Among the very large flight of swallows passing through Wise Point and Fisherman Island, Virginia, on 28 August ABA’s North American Birds editor, Ned Brinkley, saw an ABA Code-5 Brown-chested Martin (Progne tapera) reported to be of the migratory subspecies, P. t. fusca. There are only 6 records of this species from the ABA Area.
The subspecies, fusca, is an austral migrant breeding exclusively in South America, but spending the austral winter as far north as Panama (with a recent record from Costa Rica). There are only a handful of records of this species from the ABA Area, all but one (Patagonia Lake State Park, Arizona, 3 February 2006) from the East Coast. The most recent is from Cumberland Farms, Massachusetts, on 12 October 2009.
The fusca subspecies forms post-breeding flocks of hundreds or thousands of birds, often including other swallows and martin species, where they regularly fly to northern South America and Panama, remaining there from March to October/November (Handbook of the Birds of the World, Volume 9).
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