Barn Swallow - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The Barn Swallow was described by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae in 1758 as Hirundo rustica, characterised as H. rectricibus, exceptis duabus intermediis, macula alba notatîs. Hirundo is the Latin word for "swallow"; 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. This genus of blue-backed swallows is sometimes called the "barn swallows."

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the English common name "barn swallow" to 1851, though an earlier instance of the collocation in an English-language context is in Gilbert White's popular book The Natural History of Selborne, originally published in 1789:

The swallow, though called the chimney-swallow, by no means builds altogether in chimnies, but often within barns and out-houses against the rafters... In Sweden she builds in barns, and is called ladu swala, the barn-swallow.

This suggests that the English name may be a calque on the Swedish term.

There are few taxonomic problems within the genus, but the Red-chested Swallow—a resident of West Africa, the Congo basin and Ethiopia—was formerly treated as a subspecies of Barn Swallow. The Red-chested Swallow is slightly smaller than its migratory relative, has a narrower blue breast-band, and the adult has shorter tail streamers. In flight, it looks paler underneath than Barn Swallow.