The barn swallow is the most widespread species of swallow in the world. It is found in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. There are six subspecies of barn swallow, which breed across the Northern Hemisphere. Four are strongly migratory, and their wintering grounds cover much of the Southern Hemisphere as far south as central Argentina.
About Barn swallow in brief
The barn swallow is the most widespread species of swallow in the world. It is found in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. There are six subspecies of barn swallow, which breed across the Northern Hemisphere. Four are strongly migratory, and their wintering grounds cover much of the Southern Hemisphere as far south as central Argentina, the Cape Province of South Africa, and northern Australia. The barn swallow builds a cup nest from mud pellets in barns or similar structures and feeds on insects caught in flight. The species lives in close association with humans, and its insect-eating habits mean that it is tolerated by humans. It has steel blue upperparts and a rufous forehead, chin and throat, which are separated from the off-white underparts by a broad dark blue breast band. The male barn swallow’s song is a cheerful warble, often ending with su-seer with the second note higher than the first but falling in pitch. Calls include witt or witt-witt and a loud splee-plink when excited. The alarm calls include a sharp siflitt for predators like cats and a flitt-flitt for birds of prey like the hobby. The female is similar in appearance to the male, but the tail streamers are shorter, the blue of the upper parts and breast band is less glossy, and the underparts paler. The red-chested swallow is slightly smaller than its migratory relative, and has a narrower breast band and shorter tail-streamers.
This genus of blue-backed swallows is sometimes called the \”barn swallows\”. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the English common name to 1851, though an earlier instance of the collocation in an English-language context is in Gilbert White’s Natural History of Natural History. The swallow, called the swallow, builds in chimnies and out-houses against the rafters, though by no means in chimney-houses. In Sweden, she is called the barn-valus and she is the only common species called a \”swallow\” rather than a \”martin\”. There are a few taxonomic problems within the genus, but within the Swedish term the English name may be a calque on the Swedish word barns, which means “swallow” or “valley” The swallow is not endangered, although there may be local population declines due to specific threats. It was described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae as Hirundo rustica, characterised as “Hirundo rectricibus, exceptis duabus intermediis, macula alba notatîs” Hirundo is the Latin word for’swallow’ and rusticus means ‘of the country’ This species is the only one of that genus to have a range extending into the Americas, with the majority of Hirundo species being native to Africa. The nominate subspecies H. r. rustica is 17–19 cm long including 2–7 cm of elongated outer tail feathers.
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This page is based on the article Barn swallow published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
