The common house martin is a migratory passerine bird of the swallow family. It breeds in Europe, north Africa and across the Palearctic; and winters in sub-Saharan Africa and tropical Asia. It has a blue head and upperparts, white rump and pure white underparts, and is found in both open country and near human habitation.
About Common house martin in brief
The common house martin is a migratory passerine bird of the swallow family. It breeds in Europe, north Africa and across the Palearctic; and winters in sub-Saharan Africa and tropical Asia. It has a blue head and upperparts, white rump and pure white underparts, and is found in both open country and near human habitation. It builds a closed cup nest from mud pellets under eaves or similar locations on buildings usually in colonies. It is similar in appearance to the two other martin species of the genus Delichon, which are both endemic to eastern and southern Asia. The species name urbicum means ‘of the town’ in Latin. The male’s song, given throughout the year, is a soft, melodious chirps, and the alarm call is a shrill tseepseep, or ‘hard chirp’, which is given on wintering grounds. It flies with a wing beat per second, which is faster than the wing beat of the barn swallow, but the speed of 11m/s−1 is typical for hirundines at its breeding colonies. In Africa, confusion with grey-rumped swallow is possible, but that species has a grey rump, off-white underparts and long, forked tail. The female’s song is a loud, twittering twitter of melodiously chirrrp, and it is also given a hard chirrrrp and alarming call on wintered grounds, and on breeding grounds in winter. It was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his landmark 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae as Hirundo urbica, but was placed in its current genus, DelICHon, by Thomas Horsfield and Frederic Moore in 1854.
The nominate subspecies D. u. urBicum breeds across east to central Europe, central Mongolia and northern Algeria, and northern Tunisia and Algeria in winter and migrates on a broad front to northern Europe and northern Africa. Other races, like meridionalis from around the Mediterranean have been described, but claimed differences from the nominate race are clinal, and therefore probably invalid. The adult common house Martin of the western nominate race is 13 cm long, with a wingspan of 26–29 cm and a weight averaging 18.3 g. It is steel-blue above with a white rumps, and white under parts, including the underwings, and even its short legs have white downy feathering. The sexes are similar, but juvenile bird is sooty black, and some of its wing coverts and quills have white tips and edgings. It also has brown eyes and a small black bill, and its toes and exposed parts of the legs are pink. The bird is hunted by the Eurasian hobby, and like other birds is affected by internal parasites and external fleas and mites, although its large range and population mean that it is not threatened globally.
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This page is based on the article Common house martin published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
