Mark's Articles
10 - Use it or lose it (continued)
Black Redstart P ochruros
In BirdGuides' comprehensive and excellent Focus on: Black Redstart (2020), David Callahan has some interesting observations: "To avoid ecological competition in areas where Black and Common Redstarts live very close to each other (such as in Central European villages), Black breeds an average of 19 days earlier than Common and specialises in caterpillars, spiders, woodlice and ant larvae, while Common concentrates on adult insects and beetle larvae. This ecological difference is also largely maintained in habitats where the two species don't overlap."
"The male advertises its desires by singing from often very high songposts – a pair I once observed regularly near East India Dock in East London nested in the ceiling of a ground-level car park, but the male would sing from nearby rooftops at least 11 storeys high."
I remember the first time I properly heard Black Redstart singing. It was in spring 1988 on the roof of the local power station, a difficult site to access. I was scouting for a bird race on the Saturday.
Warm air has the effect of bending a sound upwards from the ground. So, beyond a certain distance from the source, a listener at ground level will be in a 'sound shadow'. Singing at greater height allows the sound to travel further before being reflected or bent upwards at ground level (Catchpole & Slater 2008). Imagine a Black Redstart singing on the scree-covered slopes of the Alps on a warm day. A Common Redstart listening while foraging at the nearby treeline may be in the sound shadow and not even hear it.
It was Killian who planned and sketched out these plates and Richard Johnson who then painted these various Black Redstart taxa.
I like physics as it is reliable. Magnus is not so keen. He can be a bit 'arty', overly romantic and composerly. Let's go back to him waxing lyrically about waterfalls and streams, all, according to him, found in the Black Redstart's song…
I do think Black Redstarts have a bit of poetry in their songs, Mark. They contain a sound quite unlike that of any other bird I know, a rhythmically patterned white noise that reminds me of a chaotic little waterfall. I like to think they took their inspiration from the fast-flowing streams in their 'classic' habitat, rocky outcrops on mountain slopes. One characteristic of white noise is that it degrades very quickly with distance, sinking into the general background sound. When you are close, this part of the song can seem as loud as the rest but at a distance it simply disappears while the rest remains audible (not physics, you understand, just a puff steam). Probably Black Redstarts can tell the distance to their rivals more easily thanks to this part of the song.
Assuming that you can hear it, the hissing part immediately removes any possible confusion between Common and Black Redstart, should you be in one of those places where both species occur in close proximity.
Here is a Black Redstart 2450 m up on a mountain slope in southern Turkey with Caspian Snowcocks Tetraogallus caspius, Alpine Accentors Prunella collaris and White-winged Snowfinches Montifringilla nivalis. This individual belongs to the nominate subspecies ochruros, which has more rufous on its underparts than gibraltariensis of Europe. Song-wise, however, the two are extremely similar.
Caucasian Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros ochruros Demirkazık, Adana, Turkey, 06:32, 16 May 2014 (Magnus Robb). Song of a male. Background: Caspian Snowcock Tetraogallus caspius, Alpine Accentor Prunella collaris and White-winged Snowfinch Montifringilla nivalis. 140516.MR.063226.01
It might seem far-fetched to say that Black Redstart and Tawny Owl Strix aluco have similar songs, but with regard to overall structure this is true. Both have compound songs built up of three different components, the first of which can be delivered on its own and the second and third of which are almost always delivered together and in a fixed order. In Black Redstart, the first can be called the fanfare as it shares some characteristics with fanfares of Common Redstart. The second is the hissing section, and the third we can call the coda, a term borrowed from classical music which means, literally, the tail.
Fanfares of Black Redstart begin, often rather hesitantly, with a narrow-band sound, which can be a whistle or something less pure-sounding. There may be more than one of these, but very quickly some much harsher, broad-band sounds will follow, repeated often in an almost rattle-like configuration. In its general pattern, especially the rapidly expanding bandwidth, the fanfare shows some parallels to a (western) Common Redstart. Codas by contrast often start with a broad-band sound or a tone that sweeps across a range of 2 kHz or so in less than a tenth of a second. Some codas contain more invention than fanfares, to the point of becoming almost tuneful. Others are simpler, very similar to a fanfare but without the tentative, narrow-band opening. Each male seems to have up to four contrasting versions each of fanfare, hissing pattern and coda.
A fanfare can be delivered on its own or in a compound strophe where it is immediately followed by hissing and a coda. So, a bout of Black Redstart song will consist of 'strophes' that may be a fanfare on its own, a hiss-and-coda on its own, a compound fanfare-hiss-coda, or sometimes even longer strophes where the parts start to appear again in the same order. You can hear all except for this extended type in the following recording from the French Pyrenees.
Western Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros gibraltariensis Refuge de Glère, Hautes-Pyrénées, France, 05:28, 23 June 2002 (Arnoud B van den Berg). Song of a male. Background: another Black Redstart. 02.024.AB.01622.11
I would analyse the variation in this song roughly as follows, using F for fanfare, H for hiss and C for coda and numbering the different variants this bird has for each. The hissing variants, incidentally, are the least well-defined of the three. F1-H1-C1, F2-H2-C2, F1, F3-H2-C1, F1-H3-C2, F1, H4-C2, F1-H2-C1, F1-H2-C1, F1-H2-C2.
There is undoubtedly more to the 'syntax' of Black Redstart songs than I have described here, but now you know to listen for them, you can have fun tracking the different components and listening out for a couple of variants of each, the next time you hear a Black Redstart singing.
I have never identified a clear, unmistakeable imitation of another species in a fully crystallised song of Black Redstart. They probably exist but even if they do, mimicry in fully crystallised songs of this species is not really 'a thing'. Plastic songs are a different story altogether, and they can have extensive mimicry. The best time to hear them is in the non-breeding season, especially in late winter.
My favourite example of Black Redstart mimicry was from a bird I recorded on a ruined house in an area of Portugal with a typical mid-Iberian range of species. I was probably looking for Spanish Imperial Eagles Aquila adalberti at the time, and the ruin was surrounded by scrubland and savannah-like 'montado' with Thekla's Larks Galerida theklae and the like. This male's whispered murmur includes imitations of Red-billed Chough Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax three times at 0:07-0:08 and a Yellowhammer Emberiza citrinella 'pttt' flight calls at 0:18, two species that were definitely not local. Most likely this was a male from the mountains of northern Spain that had wintered locally or even further south or west. The next day it was gone, presumably back to the land of choughs and Yellowhammers.
I believe I can also hear the following imitations in this Black Redstart's plastic song: Common Buzzard Buteo buteo, Eurasian Magpie Pica pica, Eurasian Crested Tit Lophophanes cristatus, Dartford Warbler Sylvia undata, Common Blackbird Turdus merula, Alpine Accentor Prunella collaris, Tawny Pipit Anthus campestris, and Common Linnet Linaria cannabina. When it eventually delivers some songs that are closer to sounding crystallised, it strings them together almost without a break.
Western Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros gibraltariensis Rosmaninhal, Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, 07:26, 8 March 2009 (Magnus Robb). Plastic song of a full adult. Background: Red-legged Partridge Alectoris rufa, Eurasian Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto, Eurasian Hoopoe Upupa epops, Great Spotted Woodpecker Dendrocopos major, Iberian Magpie Cyanopica cooki, European Serin Serinus serinus and Corn Bunting Emberiza calandra. 090308.MR.072612.11
Black Redstart is not such a long-distance traveler as Common or Ehrenberg's Redstarts. Their Western Palearctic (WP) breeding range extends from the Maghreb and Iberia north to southern Scandinavia and east to Moscow and Voronezh in Russia. Birds from cooler regions move south to the Mediterranean region for winter, with easternmost birds also moving into Arabia and the Horn of Africa. That may seem far but it's only half the distance covered by Common Redstarts.
While actually migrating, Black Redstarts use a nocturnal flight call that Daniel Lopez-Velásco and I described only last autumn (Robb, Lopez-Velásco & The Sound Approach 2020). Since then, people have been picking up this call at many locations in Europe. Talk about sound blindness! It was there all along, hiding in plain earshot, sometimes even by day. Here is the same call used by a perched migrant after sunrise, the clearest example I have. We'll come to the other, better known calls of Black Redstart further on.
Western Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros gibraltariensis Sagres, Vila do Bispo, Portugal, 4 November 2020 (Magnus Robb). Bit calls the same as nocturnal flight call, here used by a presumed migrant, perched on a rock early in the morning. Background: Spotless Starling Sturnus unicolor and Sardinian Warbler Sylvia melanocephala. 201104.MR.082034.00
Although this bird was probably from further afield, southern Iberia has particularly dark Black Redstarts formerly considered a subspecies, P o 'aterrimus'. Now they are included in gibraltariensis, which occurs in most of the Western Palearctic. In mountains of Turkey, the Caucasus and Iran lives nominate ochrurus, ‘Caucasian Black Redstart’, with its orange lower belly and vent, and in the Levant there is semirufus, ‘Levant Black Redstart’, with its entire belly rufous and clearly separated from a black throat. For the latter no recordings are available, but 'aterrimus',gibraltariensis and ochrurus have very similar songs and I have noticed no differences. Further east, however, things get more interesting.
Black RedstartPhoenicurus ochruros gibraltariensis Texel, Noord-Holland, Netherlands, 23 March 2005 (René Pop).
Caucasian Black RedstartPhoenicurus ochruros ochruros Mt Aragans, Aragatsotn, Armenia, 12 May 2011 (René Pop).