Hear the call of a rare blackstart
The early morning din of a town centre coming to life was accompanied by the strangest of voices in the dawn chorus.
Above the sounds of delivery drivers ferrying breakfasts, and town hall chimes, the black redstart’s bizarre, buzzy song filled the air.
Song is a somewhat loose term for the morning refrains of a bird distantly related to such acclaimed choristers as the nightingale and bluethroat.
The territorial song of the blackstart – to use its popular birdwatchers’ nickname – begins with a dry, gravelly chain of notes followed by a sizzle reminiscent of bacon rashers being dropped into a hot frying pan.
By rights, black redstarts are birds of boulder-strewn landscapes where exposed crags are perfect for rolling out these eerie sounds throughout the day.
How incongruous, therefore, that such harsh-terrain birds have become a feature of urban landscapes where street pigeons generally rule the roost from rooftops and ledges.
Such vantage points overlooking shops, offices and increasingly bustling streets are strategic perches for black redstarts to perform, often from heights of more than 80ft above street level.
At this range, observers will struggle to fully appreciate the strikingly beautiful male bird with its charcoal and jet plumage accentuated by white wing flashes and a fiery red tail.
The females, by contrast, are nondescript, their sooty colour scheme perfect for raising young in unprepossessing back alleys and building sites.
The presence of breeding black redstarts in British inner cities was first charted after the Second World War when the birds began to colonise the bombed-out ruins of London’s East End. Until then, it was generally a winter visitor or regular passage migrant journeying to Europe.
By the early 1980s, up to 100 singing males were noted across the southeast of England but, for unknown reasons, numbers dipped, leading to the bird being red-listed in 2015.
Since then, the breeding population has begun to rise significantly to levels recorded before the millennium, and the latest count estimates up to 80 pairs nesting.
Their song has gravelly notes and a sizzle that’s reminiscent of bacon