Asian Palm Swift

The Asian palm swift is a small, slender swift about 13cm long, mainly pale brown, with long swept-back wings shaped like a crescent or boomerang and a long, deeply forked tail that is usually held closed. The sexes are similar, and young birds differ mainly in their shorter tails. Its call is a loud, shrill scream. It is very like the African palm swift and was formerly treated as the same species (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is a bird of open country and cultivation, closely tied to palms. The nest of down and feathers is glued with saliva to the underside of a palm leaf, and saliva also holds the two or three eggs in place. Its legs are very short and used only for clinging to vertical surfaces; like other swifts it spends most of its life in the air, catching insects and drinking on the wing. In India it is resident across a very large range; SoIB 2023 has too little data for a trend and rates it a Low conservation priority (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).