What do I feed a swift?
The swift is a pure insect eater. The method of choice - namely oriented to nature! - is therefore to feed pure insects.
Wrong food leads not only to serious and painful digestive disorders, in the worst case with fatal consequences, but also to skeletal deformations, deficiency diseases, liver damage, and altered, often severely damaged feather growth, feather deformations, or feather loss!
Subadult wingless house crickets and steppe crickets from pet shops or breeding farms are excellent as feeder animals. Sizes of 12-18 mm are best. Feeding winged house crickets/crickets makes no sense. Most already have ovipositors, identifying them as sexually mature females, and are filled with egg packets. Swifts cannot digest these egg packets and excrete them undigested.
Never buy two-spotted crickets, which are more robust than other more sensitive cricket species and therefore often offered by suppliers. Swifts do not tolerate two-spotted crickets and react with severe diarrhea when fed them. This intolerance is not observed in other insect-eating wild birds such as swallows.
Feeding with house crickets and steppe crickets corresponds most closely to the natural diet of the swift of everything we can realize, is well accepted by the birds, and allows problem-free rearing. Swifts raised on house crickets/crickets are externally indistinguishable from those from natural broods and develop intact, shiny plumage. According to current knowledge, feeding with house crickets/crickets appears to be the best method and is also easiest for the carer.
Young swifts generally accept house crickets/crickets so readily that they usually snap at them by themselves, latch onto the (thoroughly disinfected) finger of the carer and let their throat be filled with food. This makes feeding much easier and saves a lot of time and effort. Semi-grown swifts (about 3rd to 5th week) ravenously devour crickets as large as 18-20 mm. With increasing age, however, the appetite will also decrease here. One can then continue well with smaller, 10-15 mm house crickets/crickets. For swifts close to fledging that no longer want to eat well, it helps to remove legs, wing covers, and front parts of the insects and feed only the soft rear parts.
How many feeder animals do you need?
To feed a swift for about 4 weeks, approximately 500-600 grams of insects are needed. If you want to cover this amount in the pet shop by buying commercially available small plastic boxes containing half a handful of crickets crawling around on a piece of egg carton, it becomes quite expensive. Ordering from a breeding farm is worthwhile.
It is difficult to specify the number of house crickets/crickets a swift consumes per meal, as it can vary greatly depending on the size of the feeder animal and the age and developmental stage of the bird. The daily mass of food supplied, balanced for different age groups, can best serve as a guideline. Also, the full bulge on the right side of the neck, visible for a short time after feeding, shows that the patient has received enough food.
However, insatiable young swifts seem to operate a kind of scrap press in their throat, so that just a few minutes after the most plentiful feeding, not a single cricket can be found in the bottomless gullet and the little liar begs as if it had been starving for days.
| Age of swift (in days) | Weight of swift (in g) | Amount of crickets/day (in g) | Amount of crickets/day (in % of body weight) | Amount of crickets (in g) per feeding with 6 feedings/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 37.70 | 15.90 | 42.20 | 2.65 |
| 32 | 37.90 | 16.50 | 43.50 | 2.75 |
| 38 | 42.90 | 12.60 | 29.40 | 2.10 |
| adult | 40.40 | 13.80 | 34.20 | 2.30 |
Am I feeding enough?
Weigh the swift daily before and after each feeding with a scale that is calibrated to one decimal place.
Under Swift -> Identification -> Age Stages you will find a table showing you the weights of a delicate young bird for days 1-44. However, stronger specimens can also weigh well over 50g before the weight reduction phase (approx. day 38).
How are the feeder animals prepared?
When ordered in larger quantities, the house crickets/crickets are killed by deep freezing. You can then fill small portions into a hand sieve as needed, thaw in warm water, drain thoroughly, and feed. Especially in summer, you must take special care that the thawed feeder animals do not spoil. Leftover insects should be placed in the refrigerator immediately after feeding and briefly warmed in warm water before the next meal.
Spoiled house crickets/crickets turn blackish and must under no circumstances be fed.
Please note:
Since the vital B vitamins are destroyed when deep-freezing feeder insects, it is essential to regularly administer vitamin B complex to the found bird.
1. Best through an injection every 10 days by the veterinarian: inject 0.1-0.15 ml vitamin B complex subcutaneously into the knee fold (not into the muscle - very painful!).
or
2. Every 2 days, prepare 3-4 crickets with vitamin B complex at one meal (i.e., inject 0.05 ml vitamin B complex into the abdomen of the cricket with a syringe), then feed the vitaminized crickets.
Normal vitamin preparations (e.g., Korvimin) are not sufficient to prevent vitamin B deficiency! Administration of vitamin B complex is absolutely necessary! see: http://www.apusapus.net/infections.html
What other feeder animals are suitable?
Drones
The male stages of the European honeybee (Apis apis) are too fatty as sole food for swifts, but are well suited as supplementary food and have proven excellent as "astronaut food" for severely weakened patients during the first critical days.
Contacts with local beekeepers can therefore be very valuable. If there are bird lovers among them, you might even get some combs with the nutritious insect larvae for free.
Be careful: Only obtain drones from poison-free beehives! However, if the beekeeper treats his bees with pesticides (e.g., against the Varroa mite), the drones are not suitable for feeding.
The combs usually contain very different developmental stages of drones from the snow-white larva to the almost ready-to-hatch insect. It is recommended to deep freeze them. Only in frozen state can you pick them out of the combs without too much effort. Then you should blanch them in boiling water for 1-2 minutes, which considerably increases the shelf life of the feeder animals, and freeze them again for storage after cooling. You can now remove and feed the required food portion.
Unblanched, the larval stages of drones cannot be fed as they are almost liquid and spoil immediately. Only tan-brown stages up to the almost finished drone (which looks like a bee but has no stinger) can also be fed without blanching. Never feed female bees! They have stingers and contain highly effective venom!
Wax moth larvae
Wax moths (Pyralidae) are bee pests. Their soft, silky-feeling larvae, which look like short, thick white worms, can be bought live in fishing shops or in blanched form from feeder animal farms. They are suitable in small quantities as supplementary food for swifts. No more than one wax moth larva should be fed per food portion. The larvae are very fatty and can cause green discoloration of droppings and digestive disorders in swifts in larger quantities.
The soft living larvae can be fed in one piece.
Blanched they become harder and rubbery and must definitely be cut into several pieces for feeding.
"Meadow plankton"
Of course, you can swarm out into nature, search with a net and lots of enthusiasm for mosquitoes, flies, moths, and all the winged pests that make life difficult outdoors on hot summer days and are therefore the best, healthiest, and most welcome bird food. But where are they when you need them? Anyone who has ever tried to catch even one meal for a hellishly hungry young swift will in future be full of reverence for the achievement of bird parents. And ultimately prefer to accept the trip to the pet shop rather than return to their patient with three squashed aphids.
If you unexpectedly prove yourself as an exterminator in the open air: Never feed insects with conspicuous colors, stingers, bristles, or similar! They would very likely be poisonous to your swift.
What about food mixtures?
In many care facilities and rearing stations, swifts are raised with food mixtures of the most diverse and often adventurous composition.
Mixtures that consist predominantly of meat (tartar, minced meat, heart meat) are to be strictly rejected. As an insect-eating bird, the swift is not designed for meat food. Nobody would think of feeding a herbivore - e.g., a horse - with meat, so why does the misinformation persist so stubbornly that one should give meat to an insectivore?
Orient yourself to nature, to what the bird eats there - then meat feeding should also seem very absurd to you.
Some experienced bird carers prepare special mixtures whose predominant content consists of pure and high-quality insect food as well as "Beo pearls", and to which the best, fresh, lean beef tartar is only added to the extent necessary to bind the crumbly insect meal into a moldable mass and form pea-sized balls for feeding. The insect food from the company "aleckwa" or "Type IV blue" from the company "Claus" is often used for this. These brands contain pure insects and not, like all other ready-made foods on the market, bakery products such as waffle pieces, which can lead to digestive disorders with potentially life-threatening consequences in young swifts and songbirds!
The DGfM categorically rejects food mixtures, even these high-quality ones; they are not used in the Frankfurt Swift Clinic and are not recommended to advice-seeking finders.
Although no feather or other damage could be observed in the rearing of swifts with the special food mixture with "aleckwa" or "Claus blue Type IV" by experienced carers in the past, as regularly occurs with inferior mixtures, it requires years of experience, great skill, and meticulous hygiene to prepare and feed such mixtures.
Persons raising a swift for the first time are overwhelmed by this and find it much easier with house crickets/crickets. A food mixture can spoil incredibly quickly, especially in summer, without you seeing it. Tartar, a component of the mixture, becomes a breeding ground for germs such as staphylococci and salmonella within a very short time. Furthermore, it requires a lot of practice to maneuver the small sticky balls into the throat of a swift without hopelessly smearing the bird in the beak and throat area. This, however, must absolutely be avoided. In the worst case, inexperienced persons could unintentionally suffocate the swift when trying to stuff the food mixture into its throat - an agonizing death. Unfortunately, this has already happened!
Meat - beef! - could be concerning in quite another respect:
Regarding the BSE problem, there are no findings concerning bird nutrition. As long as possible infection risks have not been clarified, critical caution is advised! We do not want to give our foundling a Trojan horse when we send it back to its free-living population!
In the past, people used to...
...but in the meantime there are many new findings, and fortunately we are wiser!
Certainly, in the past many things were done differently, and it was common to kill... pardon: feed every wild bird foundling with bread or minced meat. It is certainly revealing that the widespread view that "you cannot raise orphaned wild birds anyway" also dates from these times. But in reality, hand-rearing with the right and species-appropriate food hardly causes problems. Incorrect feeding, however, can have fatal consequences after a very short time!
Kitchen scraps and spoiled food have no place on the menu of a young swift, and all experiments with milk, raw egg yolk, noodles, cottage cheese, bread, oatmeal, etc. should definitely be avoided. Inventiveness is not called for here, rather the attentive look out the window: Who would feed a blackbird with fish fingers when they can see its conspecifics pulling earthworms from the lawn?
Where the sad example with the fish fingers comes from someone who unfortunately did not look out the window...
When and how often do you feed?
For well-nourished swifts, 6 feedings a day, every two to two and a half hours, are generally sufficient. One starts in the morning at seven or eight oclock and ends the day of the swift patient at 21 or 22 oclock. Do not feed at night; the poor bird wants to rest and sleep at some point just like you!
A severely malnourished swift, on the other hand, initially needs infusions and intensive care. When it begins to recover somewhat, feed a few small crickets about every half hour - preferably initially only the soft rear parts - (or preferably blanched drones) and observe whether the bird passes droppings. This is extremely important! Half-starved swifts, especially young birds, often show ravenous hunger and would like to devour the entire finger of their carer, but are still far too weak to digest food. With a wildly begging swift, the temptation is great to give as much food as the animal wants.
Very quickly, however, after initial improvement, a life-threatening stomach overload occurs, often with fatal consequences. Warning signs are weight gains of several grams in a few hours.
Regularly check by careful palpation that the birds abdomen is well filled but still soft and yielding! A hard, marble-round protruding belly means highest alert (then immediately stop feeding and preferably have the veterinarian give another infusion with restorative preparations).
Stabilizing a severely emaciated young swift can take several days. During this time, even with careful feeding, the belly may repeatedly feel hard, but if you stick firmly to giving small and easily digestible amounts of food at short intervals, the emergency situation described above will hardly occur.
The digestion-promoting preparation "Pankreon", available in pharmacies as granules, has proven to be a sensible addition for such patients: 3-4 times a day, crush 1-2 granules, dab the resulting powder with a cricket, and administer to the patient for 1-2 days.
Until the patient is "over the hill", the nightly feeding break should not be longer than 4-5 hours. After that, you can switch to normal feeding and have honestly earned your usual nights rest.
How do I feed a swift?
Unlike young songbirds, swift nestlings in human care do not "gape", i.e., they do not beg for food with open beak. And an adult swift, accustomed to hunting its insect menu in rapid flight maneuvers in the sky, does not think of voluntarily opening its beak. It has happened that swift foundlings almost starved because they did not help themselves from the obligingly placed food bowl, or that nestlings were not fed because they were thought to be full due to the lack of gaping and it was assumed they would beg if they were hungry.
Yet a comparable reflex can be triggered quite easily by gently tapping the (thoroughly washed and disinfected) finger on the left edge of the young swifts beak (see also: Feeding videos). Unless the bird is frightened, in shock, or too weakened, it will then instantly slip its beak over your finger and begin to shake and suck vigorously. It now expects the immediate transfer of the food ball that the adult bird (for whose head it takes the finger!) would regurgitate into its throat.
This reflex can be used to your advantage by quickly pushing the feeder insects past the finger into the throat of the nestling with tweezers in rapid succession. Sounds simple but is extremely complicated! Because the young swift has little patience with us. A pre-programmed reflex chain runs in it: adult bird comes with food - beak over its head - take over food ball. If this reflex chain is interrupted, e.g., because the inexperienced carers finger slips out of the beak several times or the crickets are not pushed in fast enough, then the young swift is irritated, tries once or twice more, and then goes on strike. It will then no longer voluntarily open its beak, no matter how hungry it is. The clumsy human has behaved so stupidly that it has become anxious and distrustful.
And now you have it really hard. Because now you have to "force" feed, but in a way that does not degenerate into torture, but gently and non-violently. The beak of a swift is an extremely delicate, highly sensitive construction. If you want to open it, you need a lot of sensitivity, otherwise you can damage it, cause bad pressure marks, bend it, or even break it. Sit comfortably at a table during feeding, on which you have previously placed a clean towel, and place the patient on it. Carefully fix it with your left hand. The body of the animal must be covered with a small cloth (handkerchief) so that the fat from human skin does not get onto the plumage. If you do not cover the plumage, the bird will inevitably look "greasy" after some time; above all, the insulating ability of the body plumage, on which the swift, which will later fly at high altitudes, urgently depends for survival, will be impaired.
The swift should never be held longer or more than absolutely necessary. It will instinctively react to coercive measures with defense and evasive maneuvers. This also includes the irritating habit of pushing itself backwards under the hand and handkerchief during feeding, so that the inexperienced carer is often already sweating before they could maneuver the first cricket into the throat of their charge.
So hold the bird gently but securely, fix the head, and now very carefully open the fragile beak with your right hand by very gently and without pressure sliding the fingernail between the upper and lower beak. With the index finger of the left hand that fixes the swift, you carefully hold the beak open a small bit.
Now the feeder animal must be very carefully pushed far back into the throat - over and behind the tongue - with a blunt, rounded-front tweezers (stamp tweezers, anatomical tweezers) and the beak closed. Then you gently stroke down the outside of the throat to trigger the swallowing reflex. Scratching the little throat promotes friendship and is rated by the swift as a confidence-building measure!
Sometimes the cricket slides better if you briefly dip it in some water.
Be prepared that your patient may often and gladly spit out the food until you "get the hang of it"! Patience and empathy, sensitivity and understanding are needed here: Of course, this feeding method is unfamiliar and unreasonable for the swift; it will not easily get used to it! With impatience and loud scolding, you would only frighten the animal even more, and if a beak broken through carelessness and pain were added, feeding would become torture, which the swift would resist with all its strength.
The younger the swift patient is, the sooner you will succeed in getting it to "dock" to your finger, imitating the head of the feeding parent bird with light shaking movements and pushing the crickets past the finger into its throat. Sometimes this even works with very starved adult swifts. There are even adult swifts that learn after some patient attempts to snap the feeder insects held out to them from the tweezers or finger! But this is not the rule. Usually you have to open the beak of adult swifts as well as older, almost fledged young swifts in the described manner to feed them.
Do I need to give the swift water in addition to food?
Always offer the swift a few drops of fresh water before starting feeding, which you apply to its beak edge with tweezers. Then you can see for yourself whether it drinks thirstily or shakes off the water unwillingly. The fluid needs of the patient are generally covered by the food. Crickets contain a lot of moisture, and if you have also thawed them in lukewarm water, the swift will not necessarily need anything additional to drink.
But depending on the time of day and weather, this can vary. After the night or on particularly hot days, swifts can be very thirsty. The mucous membranes of its throat should always be nice and moist and rosy. Dry mucous membranes are entry points for germs that can cause dangerous throat inflammations.
Rare but possible: Adult swift eating and drinking by itself.
Droppings
A sure indicator of good nutrition is the droppings of the swift. They should be of medium-firm consistency, dark with a white cap, and surrounded by an elastic membrane. Liquid, smelly, or thread-like black-greenish droppings betray feeding errors from wrong or spoiled food.
Always remove droppings from the swift housing as soon as possible, or cover the spots with small pieces of kitchen paper, renew the bedding if necessary, so that the swift does not soil its plumage. In natural broods, the adult birds remove the droppings of their young, so there are no soiled feathers. If your patient has nevertheless once "messed itself up", you can carefully clean droppings-soiled plumage areas with lukewarm water.
