Image: Davide D’Amico Under ideal conditions, common swifts can cover more than 500 miles per day for more than a week, report scientists. Seems like an unimaginable feat for such a tiny bird, but swifts have adopted a clever strategy that makes these epic migrations possible. Advertisement As a migrating bird, common swifts ( Apus apus) are aptly named. These highly mobile creatures spend more than 80% of their lives in the air when not in breeding mode, and a good portion of this time is spent migrating from northern Scandinavia to their wintering destinations in western and central Africa. For these long-distance migrations, scientists had previously estimated average speeds of 310 miles per day (500 km/day), but new research published in iScience has updated this figure to 354 miles (570 km/day). More impressively—not that this isn’t impressive enough—the new study shows that swifts can travel farther and faster than previously thought. At their fastest, swifts can cover more than 500 miles (830 km) each day during a nine-day stretch. The new paper was authored by Susanne Akesson and Giuseppe Bianco from the Centre for Animal Movement at Lund University in Sweden.