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MacCulloch's note that it occasionally visits the Islands for a short time on migration, very few, if any, remaining to breed. It is included in Professor Ansted's list, but only marked as occurring in Guernsey. There is, however, no specimen at present in the Museum. BLACK REDSTART. Ruticilla titys, Scopoli. French, "Rouge queue Tithys."
To my surprise and delight, the bird seemed to regard this as a surrender, for down a broad branch that sloped toward me came a most animated bundle of feathers, wings and tail wide spread, making hostile demonstrations, and scolding as fiercely as such an atom could. It had all the airs of ownership, and its colors were olive and yellow; had, then, the roguish redstart deceived me, after all?
"Practice makes perfect" is an axiom that does not apply to the art of song in the bird world; since the redstart, a member of a highly melodious family, with a good voice to start with, has never attained to excellence in spite of much practising. The song is interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority and of its character.
As it was, he promised himself to come back to look for that nest after it had been built; then he scurried back among the trees of the Old Orchard to look for other friends among the busy little Warblers who were making the Old Orchard such a lively place that morning. "There's one thing about it," cried Peter. "Any one can tell Zee Zee the Redstart by his black and flame colored suit.
Promptly every half hour the little sprite took his way to that precious apple branch, and dropped, light as a snow-flake, on a certain twig on the nearest side of his homestead. A flash from the nest announced the departure of madame, and he popped into her place. Not to settle down to business, as she did, far from it! It is a wonder to me how even a female redstart can sit still.
I should not have included the Redstart in this list, as I have never seen it in the Islands myself, but on sending a list of the birds I intended to include to Mr. MacCulloch, he wrote to say "You mention Tithy's Redstart; the common one is also seen here." I may add that I have had the same bad luck in all my former visits to the Islands, and never seen a Redstart. I suppose, however, from Mr.
The bay-breasted warbler was reported in the evergreens up by the stone house, but he failed to report to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart, however, came several times to the gravel walk below me, evidently looking for material to begin her nest.
Like the old poets, he does not dwell upon nature, except occasionally through the vistas opened up by the great sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and movement and personality, and puts in a shred of natural history here and there, the "twittering redstart," the spotted hawk swooping by, the oscillating sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned heron, the razor-billed auk, the lone wood duck, the migrating geese, the sharp-hoofed moose, the mockingbird "the thrush, the hermit," etc., to help locate and define his position.
"Happy those early days," those days of childish innocence, though I was a man grown, when every bird seemed newly created, and even the redstart and the wood wagtail were like rarities from the ends of the earth. Verily, my case was like unto Adam's, when every fowl of the air was brought before him for a name.
When the sun reached a certain height above the tree, it shone into that small mansion in such a way as to reveal its contents; thus I could see the redstart babies moving restlessly, evidently in haste already to come out into the world. This day the father took rather more than half the charge of the provision supply, and with considerable regularity.
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