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Updated: June 6, 2025
The statement that the redstart is a mimic is to be met with in many books about birds. I rather think that in jerking out these various little broken notes which end its strain, whether he only squeaks or succeeds in producing a pure sound, he is striving to recover his own lost song rather than to imitate the songs of other birds.
A distinguished ornithologist has said that little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive by melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause it to degenerate as a songster. He is speaking of the redstart.
As for Peter, he was thoroughly enjoying this visit of the Warblers, despite the fact that he was having no end of trouble trying to tell who was who. Suddenly one darted down and snapped up a fly almost under Peter's very nose and was back up in a tree before Peter could get his breath. "It's Zee Zee the Redstart!" cried Peter joyously. "I would know Zee Zee anywhere.
Either there had been but one other bairn, and he had got out before I did, things happen so rapidly in the redstart family, or there had been a tragedy, I could not discover which. Neither could I find a young bird on that tree, though I was sure, by the conduct of the parents, that at least one remained.
"Oh, uncle! Uncle Roy!" cried Dodo, who had been looking along the path, "there are two of the dearest little birds down there, and one of them is red and black as you say the Redstart is, and the other is shaped like it but has brown and yellow feathers, and they move along as if the wind was blowing them!" Male. 2.
There was always a halfpenny underneath the geranium pot in the window-sill for the child whose eye caught sight of the first swallow, redstart or sandpiper; or whose ear first recognised the clarion call of the cuckoo, or the evening "bleat" of the nightjar on the bracken-mantled fells at the end of May.
Throughout that district, where the fields are small, and the trees big and near together, he has the cirl-bunting's habit of perching to sing on the tops of high hedgerow elms and oaks. By and by I had a better bird to listen to a redstart. A female flew down within fifteen yards of me; her mate followed and perched on a dry twig, where he remained a long time for so shy and restless a creature.
Their voices were well suited to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two or three others.
Was it his aim to coax that young redstart to desert his family and follow after the traditions of the chestnut-sided? Alas! how easy to ask; how hard to answer! By this time I had become as absorbed in the drama as my companion. We forgot, or postponed, the blue, and gave the day to study of this case of domestic infelicity.
Some slight variations of plumage take place in the Black Redstart at different ages and seasons, which have led to some little difficulties, and to another supposed species, Ruticilla cairii of Gerbe being suggested, but apparently quite without reason. I have never seen the Black Redstart in the Islands at any time of year except the autumn, and do not know of its occurrence at any other time.
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