settings
Rebecca vocabulary
9 birds and/or bird terms
help & settings
[x]
-
barn swallow
-
synonyms: Hirundo ???
tags: [avian]
► definition
Definition:a family of passerine birds found around the world on all continents except Antarctica. Highly adapted to aerial feeding, they have a distinctive appearance. The term Swallow is used colloquially in Europe as a synonym for the barn swallow. There are around 83 species in 19 genera, with the greatest diversity found in Africa, which is also thought to be where they evolved as hole-nesters. They also occur on a number of oceanic islands. A number of European and North American species are long-distance migrants; by contrast, the West and South African swallows are non-migratory.
photo of Hirundo rustica: By I, Malene, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20612sound file: By Jonathon Jongsma (http://www.xeno-canto.org/83449 ) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 )], via Wikimedia Commons
► uses
Uses:
Overhead, a family of barnswallows that had taken up residence in this fine and private place after the plague struck now flew about crazily, swooping and diving, mad to get away to someplace where people weren’t.
Stephen King. The Stand (1990)
---
Melchett: Alas! Shall I ever see England more? Her rolling fields, her swooping swallows...
Blackadder: ...and her playful sheep.
BBC. Blackadder, season 2: Chains
---
Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow nests under the tiles of the coping.
Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary
---
He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other;
Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray
---
If you enter the barn, the swallows swoop down from their nests and scold. “Cheeky, cheeky!” they say.
E. B. White. Charlotte's Web (1952)
---
The section was surrounded by a metal fence topped with a band of electrified chicken wire which during the cool summer mornings would be black with roasted swallows.
Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude, p.244 (1970)
---
This tarn at least had birds; swallows dipped low over the water to drink, and plovers and curlews poked long bills into the muddy earth at its edges, digging for insects.
Diana Gabaldon. Outlander (1991)
---
as industry is taught by the ant, and building by the swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger fowl);
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)
help with search