So, what things can you look out for that will tell you which of the birds you are seeing? Firstly, swifts will be looking for nesting sites from late May to late July. Keep a look out around dusk on a warm, still evening, or early in the morning. Swifts fly very high in the sky and extremely fast, so they are difficult to spot.
One very surprising thing about them is that they hardly ever stop flying - they sleep, drink, and eat on the wing; they don't land anywhere or come very near to the ground. The teddy bears say that they get very stiff necks trying to look up all the time to spot a swift! The only time a swift stops flying is when it nests, usually in a hole in a building or roof which they fly into at speed, folding their wings in at the last second. The birds are a sooty brown colour with a crescent-shaped wingspan and a short forked tail and they make a piercing, high-pitched "scream".
