The attraction of redstarts
HEREABOUTS, by far the commonest of this attractive family is the black redstart. If you have a garden or access to a park, you will know these dark winter visitors, the male with his white wing patches, both sexes showing their characteristic red rump when they fly. Spain plays host to a huge number of wintering birds from north-eastern Europe, and relatively few remain to breed, mainly in mountainous areas. It is illuminating that the German name for the bird is hausrotschwanz (house redstart) whilst they call the common redstart gartenrotschwanz.
This latter species is strictly a summer visitor in our area, and as you read this, the year’s first sightings should be ‘in the book.’ A pretty bird, the common redstart breeds – as its German name suggests – in gardens, and in old deciduous woodland, and is best known along our coast as a passage migrant, spring and autumn, in coastal scrub.
The gorgeous little Moussier’s redstart, is a North African resident, which is quite easily seen if you visit its native haunts, being rather tame and confiding. The books will tell you that it breeds in open country with scattered trees – I always seemed to find one singing from the top of a prickly pear hedge. Outside their breeding season, they are prone to wandering, and Spanish records are not all that unusual.
Another remarkably attractive member of the family gave rise to some embarrassment on my part. I was working in my office on a building site at Burnley, when someone, who knew of my interest, burst in and said, ‘There’s a lovely little bird up in the culvert, all red, black and white.’
‘Oh yes, I thought, a bullfinch.’ The guy insisted, I eventually relented and there, of all things, was a Güldenstedt’s redstart, a sedentary species that lives in the Caucasus, migrating from the highest mountains into the valleys for the winter. (I had to use the public library to identify it!) It was a truly beautiful creature – clearly escaped from somebody’s aviary, because, to my knowledge, there exists no record of this species west of the Black Sea. Nobody else reported it, so presumably the poor thing fell foul of one of the many cats in the area.