Eurasian crag martin
The Eurasian crag martin is a small passerine bird in the swallow family. It breeds in the mountains of southern Europe, northwestern Africa and across the Palearctic. It builds a neat half-cup mud nest with an inner soft lining of feathers and dry grass. Adults and young may be hunted and eaten by birds of prey or corvids.
About Eurasian crag martin in brief
The Eurasian crag martin is a small passerine bird in the swallow family. It breeds in the mountains of southern Europe, northwestern Africa and across the Palearctic. It builds a neat half-cup mud nest with an inner soft lining of feathers and dry grass. Two to five brown-blotched white eggs are incubated mainly by the female, and both parents feed the chicks. Adults and young may be hunted and eaten by birds of prey or corvids, and this species is a host of blood-sucking mites. With its large, expanding range and large population, there are no significant conservation concerns involving the species. There are no generally recognised subspecies. Two races, Central Asian P. r. centralasica and P. r. theresae in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, have been proposed, but the slight differences in size and colour show no consistent geographical pattern. Fossils of this species have been found in Late Pleistocene deposits in Bulgaria, and in central France in layers dated at 242,000 to 301,000 years ago. The four Ptyonoprogne species are members of the swallowFamily, and are placed in the subfamily Hirundininae, which comprises all swallows and martins except the very distinctive river martins.
This bird is closely related to the other three cragmartins which share its genus, and has sometimes been considered to be the same species as one or both, although it appears that there are areas where two species’ ranges overlap without hybridisation occurring. The genus name is derived from the Greek ptuon, referring to the shape of the opened tail, and Procne, a mythological girl who was turned into a swallow. The specific rupestris means “of rocks”, from the Latin rupes “rock”. The last two species also belong to the last group; Hirundo house martins and the Cecropis and Petrochelidon swallows. Although the nests of these birds resemble those of the typical Hirundo species, a few authorities follow a practice which resembles the Barnichon barn martins, which build closed nests with an entrance tunnel. It is not known if the Delichon house martin builds an open mud nest, as some experts believe it is a closed nest, like the larger Hirundo Cecropis and the barnichon swallows, but a DNA analysis showed that if it does, it should logically contain all the mud-builder genera, including the Delichon martins. The Hirundo martin builds a closed mud nest.
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This page is based on the article Eurasian crag martin published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
