2023-11-05 07:44:00
If you pay a little attention these weeks, you can spot swifts. That is of course very strange, because these fast birds are supposed to appear here around King’s Day and have left around Ascension Day. It is a period of approximately one hundred days, which is why they are referred to as the hundred-day bird. In any case, they will be far south of the Sahara in November. Yet swifts were and are sometimes seen, but it now appears to be a different species, the pallid swift.
The pallid swift Apus Depallidus (from Latin ‘pallidus’, meaning pale or pale) closely resembles the common swift Scam scam. Both are the same size; The griffon is, as the name suggests, a lighter brown color and flies a little more thoughtfully, but with birds that fly over at great heights and with such chilling speed, the distinction is difficult to discern.
Still, anyone who sees a swift flying at this time of year can be almost certain that it is the pallid species. What are those animals doing here? That’s always an interesting question. Are they wanderers or are we seeing a shift in area related to climate change?
Storms or stupidity
There are always wanderers. Every now and then a North American bird gets lost with the help of a strong westerly storm and then ends up with us; something like this happened to a rice eater, an American bunting, in 2022. Or an Asian species becomes disoriented and ends up in the north of Drenthe; this was (also in 2022) the case with a yellow-browed bunting from eastern Siberia.
These are coincidences with no system behind them. A coincidence dependent on storms or stupidity seems to me to be absent in the pallid swift. Apart from previous sightings that were mistaken for the common swift, the first pallid swift was seen on Vlieland in October 2006.
Since then, Bird Protection tells us, they have been spotted more and more often. The number of observations is increasing rapidly. In (again) 2022 there was even talk of an invasion; more than a hundred specimens were counted at the time, especially along the coast and near the Wadden Islands. And now they are back again.
Warmer a drug
The distribution area of griffon swifts is around the Mediterranean Sea, westwards including the Canary Islands and Madeira, eastwards they occur in the Middle East and as far as Pakistan. They also migrate and spend part of the year sub-Saharan Africa. But how many Mediterranean species have reached the Netherlands in recent years?
Their names could fill this entire section, from the southern tree locust and the wasp spider to the fig tree and a whole host of small sea creatures. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pallid swift joins that list. They fly here on currents of warm wind from the south. The summers here are getting warmer and drier, we haven’t had a real winter in a long time.
The species Apus pallidus was described in 1870 by the ornithologist George Shelley, a cousin of the poet Percy Shelley. The famous romantic died at a young age in Italy, where the pallid swift is native.
Jelle Reumer is a paleontologist. Every week he discusses an animal that makes the news for Trouw.
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