View allAll Photos Tagged swift
It took a lot of shots to get one worth posting! These birds are FAST! Did you know their feet and legs are so tiny they can barely walk but in the air they are incredible.
This 1913 Swift car is called a cyclecar because it used both car and motorcycle parts. This meant it was lighter and cheaper the bigger cars. This cyclecar, P 9217, is on display in the Coventry Transport Museum.
The light was very low so I tried panning with the Swifts at Startops today. While the light was terrible, the birds were stunning. The reservoir was packed solid with swift and hirundine at all heights. It is amazing when they wiz past you and you can feel the air they move. The light made this one look very brown.
During Swift Response 2023 exercise I was able to attend some practices at Bardenas Reales shooting range in Spain by USAF A10s. No real fire (not even BRRRRRRRT, because of the ammunition) but great flying demos, some of them for the media. A great day!
Swift Creek in Hamilton County is one of the Suwannee's more interesting tributaries. With a fast flow it lives up to its name.
A view of Swift River, off the Kancamagus Highway, NH.
Boring tech note: The light was extraordinary, but some exposures were hard to compensate (i.e. shooting from deep shade into brightly lit foliage, etc.) so I spent most of the day shooting with a Tiffen Circular Polarizing Filter. I have found that it preserves the blue of the sky without compromising the vivid reds and yellows, and it prevents a lot of sky 'whiteouts' when shots include deep shadow and bright sky.
Thousands of vaux swifts fly around this chimney for about an hour and then all dive in and only happens for about 4 weeks a year!!! Hundreds of people were watching!! Sometimes they made super psychedelic patterns in the sky! Amazing to see! Thousands of birds flying in synchronicity??????!!!!!!!!!!!!! A person about 8 feet away got pooped on........ ;D
Wiki: During fall migration one of the highlights for birders is the large groups of Vaux’s swifts that communally roost in chimneys along their way. This fantastic show that the birds put on may consist of a few birds or many thousands. Agate Hall at the University of Oregon and Chapman School in Portland are two of the largest known sites in the world housing thousands of swifts and drawing many onlookers. Vaux’s swifts are linked with old growth forest and need large hollow snags for nesting. The species is likely declining and migration is a great time to survey the population.
I could sit and watch these birds all day. The only problem is that their daily routine is very variable and it is impossible to predict when they will be flying low over my house like this morning.
Mt Baker Wilderness, Washington
Mid August in the North Cascades: the upper parking lot had been cleared of enough snow to reveal the restrooms but it was like parking in a giant snowbowl. Although quite a few trails were obliterated by the snowpack, the trail to Lake Ann lost enough elevation and received enough direct sun to be open. At the bottom of the switchbacks, spring greenery filled the valley. Erratics littered the glacial meadow hosting Swift Creek, and Mt Baker dominated the skyline, out where the valley dropped off.
This is a two picture HDR rendering in Photomatix. The camera couldn't hold the glare of the peak and the landscape; I also tried a split ND, but blending two exposures made for a better transition.
CNW 8049 has just rounded the curve and left the City Limits of Lincoln California, and is now notching out and accelerating North towards Marysville California.
CNW 8049 Clayton CA. 3/22/97 16:30
97014-25 Professional Kodachrome-25
Rescanned and uploaded on January 23, 2025
It takes a lot of work with Setwings to get them to pose like this. They can be very skittish till they're used to you. And you have to have just-the-right-light. My Georgia yard after a two-day photo session ;-)
Streptoprocne biscutata
A very large Swift; new to me and present in huge numbers especially on this morning. There was a constant stream passing for long periods of time, numbering many thousands of birds.
The broken neck collar is diagnostic.
One of many Swifts from today at Stodmarsh in between the rain showers. The fastest birds in level flight, with an impressive top speed of 69mph
[Apus apus]
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A common swift (Apus apus) that I photographed by some nesting boxes one month ago.
It was really cool to have them flying right above my head in a really high speed. Their maximum horizontal flying speed is 111.6 km/h (69.3 mph).
Except when nesting, swifts spend their lives in the air, living on the insects caught in flight. They drink, feed, and often mate and sleep on the wing. Some individuals go 10 months without landing
It's the first time I've managed to get some okay photos of them, but I have to try some more next year to get even better ones.
Now most of them are on their way back to Equatorial and Sub-Equatorial Africa for the winter.
Swifts form pairs that may couple for years, and often return to the same nesting site and partner year after year, repairing degradation suffered in their 40-week migratory absence.
Their summer breeding range runs from Portugal and Ireland in the West across to China and Siberia in the East. They breed as far south as Northern Africa (in Morocco and Algeria), with a presence in the Middle East in Israel, Lebanon and Syria, the Near East across Turkey, and the whole of Europe and most of sub-Arctic Russia.
(TÃ¥rnseiler in Norwegian)
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Joining the ranks of industrial equipment rusting into oblivion on CCTs property, this old crane frames BUGX 2000 as the the crew swiftly moves out of the shops to begin a perilous day of switching
As its name suggests, the swift fox is a speedy and agile native of North American grasslands, with top speeds exceeding 30 mph.
Slight of build, the swift fox is roughly the size of a house cat, measuring between 12 and 16 inches tall and weighing a mere 5 to 7 pounds.
Primarily a nocturnal species, this individual was spotted during the day in north-central Colorado.
Credit: Ryan Moehring / USFWS
I'm riding the trailing SD40-2 on train 909. A few minutes earlier we had heard train 910 with 772 on the point clear at Swift. The radio crackled "switches lined and locked main to main" and we are rolling right along at the authorized 40mph as I lean out for a shot of our meet. Fun times back in the early 80's