Literarily, the first known mention of the Common Swift seems to date back to the Bible: LACK (1956) expresses the conviction that the Hebrew "sus" in the 8th chapter of the Prophet Jeremiah refers to the swift and not the swallow, since in modern Arabic "sus" also stands for swift: "The stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swift observe the time of their coming," it would then read.
Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder, 23–79 AD) vividly reports in his "Natural History of Man and Animals" about the Apodes and Cypselus apus, the swift: "Most of all fly the so-called footless ones, because the use of their feet is denied to them; others also call them cave birds. They belong to the swallows and nest in rocks. [...] The other birds at least sit and stand, but these have no rest anywhere except in the nest, for they either fly or they lie."
In 1612, SAMUEL DRAYTON wrote in "Noah"s Flood": "The swift-wing"d swallow feeding as she flies / With th" airy swift the skies penetrating –". In "Annus mirabilis" by JOH. DRYDEN (1667) there is talk of the "swift on high in the sky"; and in 1774 GILBERT WHITE described swifts ("Entertaining birds") and their habits in word and verse in "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne".
THOMAS PENNANT reported in "British Zoology" of 1776 about a swift pair that was found frozen but alive in the chapel of Longnor in Shropshire in February 1766, and expressed the suspicion that this species spent the winter this way – a hard-to-explain phenomenon, but not the only report of this kind (LACK, 1956).
HERMANN LÖNS calls the Common Swifts "death birds" and "plague swallows" in his "Animal Stories" in the Chronicle of a Council Scribe: "But on the first of May, at the tower of St. Aegidii, terribly large and extraordinarily fast birds of the swallow kind appeared, screaming so terribly that those who heard it were greatly frightened. If these birds unknown here are the plague swallows, from which it can be concluded that the misery will not end soon."
Plague times were in the 14th century, but also again in 1610.
Already CONRAD GESNER devoted a longer treatise to the Common Swift in his "Bird Book" in 1557 (cf. 1981 reprint of the 2nd edition from 1669), and in the famous work by J. A. NAUMANN (Volume 4, 1840) the first authoritative scientific description in German appeared.
Modern monographs about the species were published by LACK in 1956, who thoroughly studied a breeding colony in Oxford and in many cases also relied on the Swiss EMIL WEITNAUER, who studied the Common Swift extensively, especially from 1948 to 1955. In the 1950s, WEITNAUER finally proved the aerial roosting of the Common Swift beyond doubt with the help of night flights and radar. This gives the Common Swift a special position among all bird species on Earth.
Even today, many aspects of the Common Swift"s life are unknown and mysterious. Due to its aerial lifestyle, it largely eludes the conventional possibilities of bird observation and is difficult to study even at the nesting site – the only point of contact with humans and earth – since nests are usually not accessible. Studying the life of a continuous flier in captivity is hardly possible. Only accessible natural colonies, the hand-rearing of orphaned young swifts and the handling of individuals who temporarily depend on human help provide insights into the behavior and lifestyle of the "mysterious guest beneath our roofs" (LACK, 1956).