Mark's Articles
10 - Use it or lose it (continued)
Eastern Black Redstart P o phoenicuroides/ rufiventris
‘Eastern Black Redstart’ has come on many birders' radar in the last couple of decades, since it can be prone to vagrancy, with records in late autumn or early winter most years in western Europe (van der Spek & Martinez 2018). Its range starts in eastern Turkmenistan and extends to China and Mongolia. There are two subspecies in the Eastern Palearctic, and both are currently still included in the one species with their Western Palearctic cousins. Phoenicuroides breeds further north and is the one that has reached Europe; rufiventris is a shorter distance migrant, presumably less prone to vagrancy.
At this point a confession is required. I have very little direct experience of Eastern Black Redstart. I have seen them during a recording trip to India but if one ever sang I was distracted with some other Asiatic gem and failed to record it. The same can be said for my Sound Approach colleagues. Fortunately, Xeno-canto has a good number of examples, and two friends, Hannu Jännes and Ralph Martin, kindly shared several more. Between these sources I have listened to enough songs of phoenicuroides and rufiventris to notice a difference from all the gibraltariensis and ochruros songs in our own collection.
Without further ado, it's this. Fanfares and codas in the Eastern Palearctic have a strong tendency to end on an upbeat, an emphatic final note. The fact that both fanfare and coda share the emphatic endings in Eastern suggests a common origin for both of these song components, which only really differ in the way they start. Indeed, one can occasionally hear a fanfare that appears - stripped of its hesitant opening - as a coda later in the same song, or vice versa. This applies to all Black Redstarts, not just Eastern.
Here is one of Hannu's recordings, from Ladakh, where it is phoenicuroides that breeds (Rasmussen & Anderton 2012); the upbeat at the end of the fanfare is the loudest moment in these compound songs. I hear the same thing in 10 of the 14 songs of phoenicuroides and all 6 of rufiventris on Xeno-canto.
Eastern Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros phoenicuroides Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India, 18 September 2014 (Hannu Jännes). Song of a male. A two minute silence from 0:34 has been cut down to a few seconds. Background: Chukar Partridge Alectoris chukar.
In this recording two other features are noteworthy. One is that the frequency range extends lower that in most Black Redstarts from Europe, well below 2 kHz in some of the codas. Nicolas Martinez (pers comm) has noticed that in phoenicuroides songs there are more melodious song elements given at low frequencies, ie, with the complete element having its fundamental below 3.5 kHz and melodious parts, not just trills, going far below 3 kHz.It is also noteworthy that in the above song the hissing sections have a simultaneous humming sound with a fundamental frequency around 1 kHz.
The other recording Hannu sent is from Xining, Qinghai, China, where it is rufiventris that breeds. It also has emphatic endings to the fanfare and the coda, but in this case modulated to give a buzzing timbre. This recording does not have particularly low-pitched elements.
Not every Eastern Black Redstart has clear emphatic endings to the fanfare and the coda in its songs. This one from Tajikistan, provided by Ralph Martin, doesn't have it in the fanfare, and in the coda it puts and accent on the penultimate note. Conversely, Black Redstarts in the Western Palearctic can occasionally have a hint of this feature. For example, the first Black Redstart song from Turkey above had a fairly emphatic ending to the coda at 0:14. On the whole, though, this is something you can find much more strikingly in Black Redstarts from the Eastern Palearctic, and it deserves closer study.
Eastern Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros phoenicuroides Alaudinskoye Ozero, Chapdara, Tajikistan, 6 May 2018 (Ralph Martin). Song of a male. Background: Himalayan Snowcock Tetraogallus himalayensis and White-winged Grosbeak Mycerobas carnipes.
Eastern Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros phoenicuroides Alaudinskoye Ozero, Chapdara, Tajikistan, 6 May 2018 (Ralph Martin). The male in the recording above.
In our own collection, the only Eastern Black Redstart song we have is plastic song of a vagrant in the Netherlands, too lacking in structure to look for the features under discussion above. This recording includes at least one imitation of an Eastern Palearctic species: Yellow-browed Warbler P inornatus, unmistakeable at 1:29 (and also, less clearly, at 0:09 and 1:44). In addition, there is mimicry of Tree Pipit several times, and I believe, Eurasian Siskin Spinus spinus at 1:47.
Eastern Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros phoenicuroides Reiderwolder Polderdijk, Groningen, Netherlands, 10:01, 6 March 2018 (Arnoud B van den Berg). Imitative plastic song of a first-winter male. Background: Greater White-fronted Geese Anser albifrons, Barnacle Goose Branta leucopsis, Common Linnet Linaria cannabina and Common Reed Bunting Emberiza schoeniclus. 180306.AB.100100.22
It is impossible to resist the temptation to share another of Ralph Martin's recordings, a beautiful plastic song he recorded in Tajikistan. This is also full of mimicry, with subjects I can recognise including Sulphur-bellied Warbler Phylloscopus griseolus, Red-breasted Flycatcher Ficedula parva, Brown Accentor Prunella fulvescens, Eastern Yellow Wagtail Motacilla tschutschensis, Tree Pipit Anthus trivialis, Common Rosefinch and White-winged Grosbeak Mycerobas carnipes. As you can probably tell, I love the nerdy challenge of identifying mimicry, but there is certainly more in there for anyone else who wants to have a go.
It is a rare privilege to hear a vagrant Eastern Black Redstart singing, and Arnoud was lucky to get his recording. In Europe we are far more likely to hear calls. Black Redstarts in general have two that they use most often, a whistle and a tuc. Of these the tuc appears not to vary geographically. Here are examples of tuc calls in the Western and the Eastern Palearctic.
Western Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros gibraltariensis Sagres, Vila do Bispo, Portugal, 10:22, 2 December 2017 (Magnus Robb). Tuc calls of a wintering bird beside a small pool. Background: wingbeats of Iberian Magpie Cyanopica cooki and European Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis. 171202.MR.102230.10
Eastern Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros phoenicuroides Alaudinskoye Ozero, Chapdara, Tajikistan, 6 May 2018 (Ralph Martin). Tuc calls and song fragments of the same male as in the first recording from Tajikistan above. Background: Himalayan Snowcock Tetraogallus himalayensis, Red-billed Chough Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax, Hume's Warbler Phylloscopus humei and White-winged Grosbeak Mycerobas carnipes.
Black Redstart tuc calls differ from Common Redstart plit calls in being lower-pitched and having a different timbre. Very short, broad-frequency calls like this can often be rather difficult to tell apart, but redstarts are quite doable. If you work with sonagrams a lot, you can learn to tell the difference between very short calls that rise sharply in pitch, such as the tic of a European Robin Erithacus rubecula, the plik of a Cetti's Warbler Cettia cetti or the plit of Common Grasshopper Warbler Locustella naevia and those calls that descend rapidly in pitch, such as the tsip of Song Thrush Turdus philomelosor the tok of a Ring Ouzel T torquatus. Common Redstart is very clearly in the rising group, and if you listen carefully to its plit calls they resonate with the terminal high frequency. There is no such effect with Black Redstarts, which have a much more nondescript, low-pitched tuc.
Black Redstart's equivalent to Common Redstart huit, heed and vist calls is a short, fairly high-pitched whistle that rises slightly in pitch, and can be transcribed as weet. Whereas Common huit calls range from 3 - 4.5kHz and the heed whistle found in Ehrenberg's Redstart and some Common sits around 4.5 kHz, Black Redstarts are generally higher than this, around 5.5 - 6 kHz in gibraltariensis and ochrurus (Martinez & van der Spek in prep).
Whistle-tak is a call combination frequently found in both Common and Black Redstarts of all populations (where a generic tak is the plit of Common or the tuc of Black). A rule of thumb to separate whistle-tak calls of Common and Black is as follows. In Common (including Ehrenberg's) the whistle, which can be huit, heed or vist, sounds relatively low-pitched compared to the plit, so the pitch rises from whistle to plit, whereas in Black of all subspecies the whistled weet sounds higher-pitched than the tuc, so the pitch falls from whistle to tuc.
Common Redstart Phoenicurus phoenicurus phoenicurus Kalenberg, Overijssel, Netherlands, 1 June 2005 (Magnus Robb). Huid and plit calls of a female. Background: Common Blackbird Turdus merula. 05.013.MR.11523.01
Western (‘Caucasian’) Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros ochruros Gergeti, Greater Caucasus, Georgia, 26 June 2005 (Arnoud B van den Berg). Weet and tuc calls of an adult female. Background: juvenile Black Redstart and House Sparrow Passer domesticus. 05.015.AB.05753.20
Nicolas Martinez and Vincent van der Spek (pers comm) have found geographical patterns in the weet whistles of Black Redstarts, which they will present in a paper currently in preparation. In short, they are finding that Eastern Black Redstarts have lower-pitched weet calls than Western Black Redstarts. Here are examples illustrating this difference.
Western Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros gibraltariensis Vallée d'Ossoue, Hautes-Pyrénées, France, 3 September 2007 (Arnoud B van den Berg). Weet calls. Background: Water Pipit Anthus spinoletta. 070903.AB.082723.21
Eastern Black Redstart Phoenicurus ochruros phoenicuroides Bharatpur, Rajasthan, India, 19 January 2002 (Magnus Robb). Weet calls of a male. Background: Rose-ringed Parakeet Psittacula krameri. 02.004.MR.02053.00
We have offered Nicolas and Vincent our own recordings and look forward to the full story in due course.