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Barn Swallow

Hirundo rustica
BARS · Hirundinidae · Swallows
Urban provisional · from family
1heard

The barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) is the most widespread species of swallow in the world. In fact, it appears to have the largest natural distribution of any of the world's passerine, ranging over 251 million square kilometers globally. It is a distinctive passerine bird with blue upperparts and a long, deeply forked tail. It is found in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. In Anglophone Europe it is just called the swallow; in northern Europe it is the only common species called a "swallow" rather than a…

Wikipedia ↗
mean confidence
13–13 in wingspan

Wingspan and trait data: Fox et al. (2026), CC BY 4.0; incorporating AVONET (Tobias et al. 2022) and BirdWingData (Shiomi et al. 2025)

Barn Swallow
JJ Cadiz, Cajay - Own work, CC BY 3.0
1Detections
1Days heard
0.69Mean confidence
6 AugFirst heard
6 AugLast heard
13,130Stations worldwide

By hour of day

00061218

Counts reflect vocal activity and ambient noise, not abundance.

Recent days

Not enough history A seasonal chart needs a year of records. This shows daily counts until then.

Where heard

At home1 detections
On outings0 detections

Home and away are counted separately everywhere except here.

Where it lives

Breeding and resident range, from BirdWeather. Not where you have heard it — that is the map on the Outings page.

Leaflet · CARTO · range polygons from BirdWeather

Recordings

Highest-confidence detections first. Confidence is a threshold, not a probability of being correct.

2026-08-06 05:14
9 s
0.69
Station PUC-29278 on BirdWeather Data updated 27 Sep, 10:15am Archive