sand-martin

plural sand-martins

1. a migratory passerine bird in the swallow family.

   1 more example

   But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until the ships in the Piraeus fired their guns.

   1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, Vintage Classics, paperback edition, page 172