African red-rumped swallow
species of bird
The African red-rumped swallow (Cecropis melanocrissus) is small passerine bird in the swallow family Hirundinidae. It is found in north tropical areas of Africa south of the Sahara.
Taxonomy
The African red-rumped swallow was formally described and illustrated in 1845 by the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell based on a specimen collected in the Tembien region of northern Ethiopia. He coined the binomial name Cecropis melanocrissus where the specific epithet combines the Latin melas, melanos meaning "black" with Modern Latin crissum meaning "vent".
Four subspecies are recognised:
C. m. domicella (Heuglin, 1869) – west Africa from Senegambia to east Sudan
C. m. melanocrissus Rüppell, 1845 – Ethiopia and Eritrea
C. m. kumboensis (Bannerman, 1923) – Sierra Leone and west Cameroon
C. m. emini (Reichenow, 1892) – southeast Sudan, Uganda and Kenya to Malawi and north Zambia
The subspecies C. m. domicella was formerly treated as a separate species, the West African swallow, while the subspecies C. m.
“African red-rumped swallow” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what African, red-rumped and swallow can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131403429. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1845, 1869, 1923 and 1892.
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This entry incorporates text from “African red-rumped swallow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.