This brown swift has a white throat, breeds from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and winters in the Sahel.
The brown body has a greyish forehead, dark eye patch and broad white throat patch. The head and neck are broad, and the outer primaries are darker than the inner ones.
Pallid Swifts catch insects in flight and carry them to their nestlings. At a breeding colony in northwestern Italy, researchers compared food boluses delivered by adults in 1987–1990 and 2012–2013. The later samples contained 5,980 prey items, classified into 37 families or superfamilies across eight orders. Hemiptera and Diptera were the most frequently recorded groups.
The broad composition of the diet did not differ significantly between the two periods, more than 20 years apart. In the later samples, however, over 70% of the beetles were Diabrotica virgifera, a species not recorded in Italy before 2000. The prey carried to nestlings included many kinds of insects flying above the breeding site.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
Food delivered to nestlings at one northwestern Italian colony contained prey from 37 families or superfamilies. In 2012–2013 samples, more than 70% of the beetles were Diabrotica virgifera.