Hirundo tahitica
The Tahiti swallow is a small passerine bird in the swallow family Hirundinidae. It is found on the islands of Moorea and Tahiti in French Polynesia. It was formerly considered to be conspecific with the Pacific swallow.

Cricket Raspet · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- Pacific swallowPBDB
- Sits inside
- HirundoPBDB
- Diet
- insectivorePBDB, for Hirundinidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Hirundinidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Hirundinidae
- Mass
- 15 gWikidata
Time the record covers
At most 129 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 129 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
3 occurrences of Hirundo tahitica on record, most of them in the Holocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
3 occurrences- Pleistocene33%
- Holocene67%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Hirundo tahitica and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Hirundo tahitica and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
85 taxa- Puffinus3 sites
- Acrocephalus taiti2 sites
- Anous2 sites
- Anous ceruleus2 sites
- Gallicolumba leonpascoi2 sites
- Gygis alba2 sites
- Nesofregetta fuliginosa2 sites
- Phaethon rubricauda2 sites
- Prosobonia sauli2 sites
- Pterodroma2 sites
- Pterodroma nigripennis2 sites
- Ptilinopus insularis2 sites
- Puffinus nativitatis2 sites
- Zapornia atra2 sites
- Amphibolurus1 site
- Anas castanea1 site
- Anas superciliosa1 site
- Anseranas semipalmata1 site
- Antechinus flavipes1 site
- Ardenna pacifica1 site
- Bettongia lesueur1 site
- Bettongia penicillata1 site
- Bountyphaps obsoleta1 site
- Cercartetus lepidus1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 3 sites for Hirundo tahitica, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
2 references- The fossil birds of Henderson Island, Pitcairn Group: natural turnover and human impact, a synopsis2
- Late Pleistocene Faunal Remains from Seton Rock Shelter, Kangaroo Island, South Australia1
Each of the 3 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Hirundo tahitica
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Cricket Raspet
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Hirundo tahitica was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itHirundo through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Gmelin 1789