蜜芽传媒

In this series for 蜜芽传媒 Sounds and 蜜芽传媒 Radio 4, best-selling author and scholar Katherine Rundell celebrates the lives of twenty astonishing but endangered animals. Each short essay includes fascinating stories that connect natural history with cultural insight, myth and science - revealing how animals have shaped human imagination, and how our choices now shape their survival.

In this short essay, written and read by Katherine, we meet the swift - a bird so committed to flight that it spends at least ten months of the year airborne. Over its lifetime, a swift will fly around two million kilometres: enough to reach the moon and back twice, and then once more to the moon. They even sleep on the wing, as witnessed by a First World War pilot who described flying through a motionless flock in the night sky.

Swifts belong to the family Apodidae, from the Greek 谩pous, meaning 鈥渇ootless鈥� - a reflection of the belief that they had no legs. They do, but if all goes well, they rarely need them. Yet in Britain, swift numbers have dropped by 50% in the last two decades, as nesting sites vanish with the demolition of old buildings.

Written and Presented by Katherine Rundell
Produced by Natalie Donovan for 蜜芽传媒 Audio in Bristol