Kathleen,

I can help with a couple of the questions.

Do swifts sleep while flying? Very few physiological studies have been
conducted on bird sleep, all of them (that I am aware of) on Glaucous-winged
Gulls. So we will have to assume that swifts do the same as the gulls (real
good assumption, I know). Gulls have the ability to sleep with one side of
their brain. While the left side "sleeps" (and thus the right side of their
body is fairly inactive), the right side of the brain is "awake" (and so the
left side of their body can be "active"). Thus a bird can still keep one eye
open and vigilant, as well as one ear, while the other parts are snoozing.
These birds are able to do this also while flying How? Because the parts of
the brain that are responsible for flight are decoupled from the parts of the
brain that sleep. In fact, these birds can actually take short "naps" while
flying (the entire brain, not just one half), with the beating of the wings on
some sort of "automatic pilot". Yes, gulls can sleep while flying. So maybe
swifts can, too.

Hummingbirds do not build little nests, and probably don't find any sort of
crevice, either. They will do their torpor-thing in trees or bushes
(according to the few documented cases of hummers being found torpid in the
wild).

The actual papers are found in Condor, Animal Behavior, Sleep, Sleep Research,
Physiological Zoology, and Auk.

Hopefully this helps!



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* Jim Nestler email: nestja at wwc.edu *
* Department of Biological Sciences phone: 509-527-2551 *
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