The name marsh tern refers to

tern Terns are seabirds in the family Laridae, subfamily Sterninae, that have a worldwide distribution and are normally found near the sea, rivers, or wetlands. Terns are treated in eleven genera in a subgroup of the family Laridae, which also ...

s of the genus ''Chlidonias'', which typically breed in freshwater marshes, rather than coastal locations.

Taxonomy

The genus ''Chlidonias'' was introduced in 1822 by the French polymath

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz (; 22 October 178318 September 1840) was a French early 19th-century polymath born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire and self-educated in France. He traveled as a young man in the United States, ult ...

with ''Sterna melanops'' Rafinesque = ''Sterna surinamensis'' Gmelin, J.F. as the

type species In International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature, zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the spe ...

. The article was reprinted in: The name ''Chlidonias'' is from

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

, "swallow-like", from , "

swallow The swallows, martins, and saw-wings, or Hirundinidae are a family of passerine songbirds found around the world on all continents, including occasionally in Antarctica. Highly adapted to aerial feeding, they have a distinctive appearance. The ...

Species

The genus contains four species: Notice the hesitation in the gender of the epithet of the scientific names, as they are usually masculine (''albostriatus, leucopterus'' or ''niger''), but in the case of the whiskered tern is mostly used as feminine (''hybrida''), maybe from the influence of the previous gender used, ''

Sterna ''Sterna'' is a genus of terns in the bird family Laridae. The genus used to encompass most "white" terns indiscriminately, but mtDNA sequence comparisons have determined that this arrangement was paraphyletic. It is now restricted to the typi ...

''. The

black-bellied tern The black-bellied tern (''Sterna acuticauda'') is a tern found near large rivers in the Indian subcontinent, its range extending from Pakistan, Nepal and India to Myanmar. It has become very scarce in the eastern part of its range and the Intern ...

(''Sterna acuticauda'') and the

white-cheeked tern The white-cheeked tern (''Sterna repressa'') is a species of tern in the family Laridae. It is found around the coasts on the Red Sea, around the Horn of Africa to Kenya, in the Persian Gulf and along the Iranian coast to Pakistan and western In ...

(''Sterna repressa'') might also be placed in ''Chlidonias''.

References

* Taxa named by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque {{Charadriiformes-stub