Description
Black Rough-winged Swallow is a small swallow at 13–15 cm length with a forked tail. Its plumage is blue-glossed black. Sexes are similar, but the female has shorter outer tail feathers, and less obvious wing serrations. Juveniles are brown with little gloss, and have short tails.
There are many subspecies of this swallow, which some authorities may split into different species. In particular, four northeasten races, including nominate P. p. pristoptera, have conspicuous white underwing coverts (all other subspecies are green-glossed and have completely dark underwings), and may be split as the Eastern Rough-winged Swallow or Eastern Saw-wing (Swallow), P. orientalis. This leaves P. p. holomelaena as the Black Rough-winged Swallow, P. holomelaena. Other subspecies are also sometimes elevated to species status, but Turner and Rose take the view that all the races of the Black Rough-winged Swallow are, at best, incipient species.
Read more about this topic: Black Saw-wing
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“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)