These are adults gathering mud for their nests. This is the common swallow in most of coastal New Guinea. Of the four subspecies which occur in New Guinea, H. t. frontalis is expected breeding in northern New Guinea. This race was included with H. t. albescens of southern New Guinea before the latter was described by Schodde & Mason in 1999. They characterized H. t. albescens as paler below with larger tail spots cf frontalis. Some authors (del Hoyo et al. 2019) split H. tahitica into two species of which our bird becomes House Swallow (H. javanica). However this split has not yet been adopted by any of the three major world checklists.