Scientific name: Riparia paludicola
The Brown-throated Martin has a height of 12 cms and weighs around 12 gms. The head is coloured brown while the bill is coloured black and it has a brown coloured throat and black legs.
The nests are at the end of tunnels of 30 to 60 cm in length, bored in sandbanks.
Here it is locally common across much of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, but particularly abundant in the Western Cape. It also has large populations in the Caprivi Strip and northern and southern Botswana; much less common in Zimbabwe, Namibia and southern Mozambique. It generally prefers rivers, open wetlands, dams, sewage works and estuaries, also foraging over land habitats, especially fynbos, karoo and grasslands.
It exclusively eats insects, doing most of its foraging in daylight, although it may feed after sunset at emergences of aquatic insects or termite alates. It forages in flocks over water bodies with with other swallows and swifts, grabbing prey from the water surface. It also aerially hawks insects over grassland or shrubland.
