If any animal could be considered an artist, it is surely the redstart
The redstart or ‘fireflirt’s’ painterly good looks aren’t the only attribute that bewitches Mark Cocker–its extraordinary talent for mimicry brings the whole world within reach
If there is a more completely engrossing British bird than the common redstart, then I would struggle to name it.
One indisputable aspect of this charisma is physical beauty. Not only is the male colourful, there is also a jeweller’s precision placement to the parts. The back is smooth slate grey, the breast is glistening terracotta, whereas the face is notable for a crisp jet-black triangle outlined with a white brow.
Perhaps most remarkable is that, as he sings, he reveals a mouth lined with citrous yellow. Yet the defining feature is possessed by both sexes. They have glorious ferruginous tails and, even now, I vividly recall seeing my first redstart more than 50 years ago. She was a female and suddenly burst from hawthorn bushes close to my Derbyshire home as an entirely unknown fire-tailed bird. The first thought in that 12-year-old’s muddled head was for a nightingale. After all, I was armed only with The Observer’s Book of Birds, in which half the ancient plates were in black and white.
Slowly, it became clear that nightingales were never seen in my county. Disappoint-ment, however, was obliterated by the vision of this bird itself. She was not only beautiful in colour, but also in shape: slender and elegant. As she moved, her hind parts vibrated so that the red tail shivered — no wonder the bird was once called a ‘fireflirt’. Even the word redstart refers to this same detail and is rooted in the Old English word steort, meaning ‘tail’.
'Even now, I vividly recall seeing my first redstart more than 50 years ago'
There is a jewel-like perfection about the eggs of Phoenicurus phoenicurus
Redstarts are migrants, moving between Africa and those parts of Europe and Asia lying between the July isotherms of 10ºc – 24ºc. About 130,000 pairs breed in these islands, mainly in upland northern and western districts, and usually in broadleaved woods or in parkland-type country that comprises solitary mature trees — ash trees in Derbyshire — with mixed scrub and open rocky ground.
They can achieve very high breeding densities, with parts of western Scotland holding 50 pairs to a square kilometre. What places a limit on their presence is the availability of suitable nest-holes. These can be cavities in trees, but I have found redstarts nesting in crevices in exposed limestone scree or under rocks by the side of a footpath. To complete the impression of some overarching beauty, even the redstart’s eggs are exceptional. For the first time ever, I saw a clutch this year. Almost perfectly oval, they were an unmarked sky-blue with a soft lustre like unglazed china. Lying in a circular feather bed, they had the finished quality of six lapis jewels.
If there was an aspect to the bird that appeared to let it down, it was the redstart song. The author W. H. Hudson set the trend on a long pattern of denigration when he suggested that the sound was ‘interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority… It is impossible to listen for any length of time… without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is only the prelude of a song — a promise never performed’.
'Should we not consider the possibility that redstarts have been practising exactly the same gifts — art, if you will — in the way that we do still?'
It is true that the song is short. Each passage is only two to three seconds long, but what the redstart appears to lack in content it makes up through persistence. Each sound unit is followed by a six- to seven-second interval when it delivers the next short phrase. The pattern can continue for hours. As a male plays no part in nest construction or incubation, he can deliver thousands of separate songs every day and sings for hours on end. What Hudson never appreciated is that each individual unit is packed with the mimicry of other birds.
Those gifts had been recognised for decades. In the 1840s, ornithologist William Yarrell noted that redstarts included the sounds of sparrows and chaffinches in their songs. However, it was poet John Buxton who, when incarcerated as a German prisoner-of-war in Bavaria, wrote more fully about these gifts. In his monograph The Redstart (1950), the Oxford scholar recorded 14 other birds copied by redstarts, including wryneck, night-ingale and golden oriole.
My own introduction to this ability in redstart arose during lockdown. I happened to hear one singing and incorporating snatches of nuthatch and redpoll sounds into its repertoire. That slowly unlocked a full-scale research project that has led me to astonishing personal discoveries. To date, I have recorded 70 species being copied by Derbyshire redstarts. As you would expect, the list includes birds that are their neighbours at breeding sites — curlews, great spotted woodpeckers, house martins and swallows, meadow pipits, pied wagtails, willow warblers, whitethroats and coal tits.
The redstart may mimic other birds' songs, but this male is tricked into feeding the imposter cuckoo in its nest.
The song also features many species that can only be met on migration in Spain or further south in North Africa. The redstarts then bring to Derbyshire note-perfect renderings of little ringed plover, common sandpiper, European nightjar, little and scops owls and Sardinian warbler. Pride of place perhaps goes to the bird at Bonsall Moor, near the town of Cromford, that imitated a common bulbul, a species you could not find within 1,000 miles of Bonsall. That redstart had to have heard it somewhere in Africa and there it was — re-creating for me the soundscape of another continent.
I should add that none of this extraordinary vocal ability was new to European naturalists. They have long investigated the subject and these researches culminated in 2020, when a Spanish father-and-son team, Godfried and Pedro Schreur, working with friends, made a recording of a male red-start singing in Badajoz province. It was imitating the calls and sounds of 51 other birds in 60 minutes of song. There are so many aspects of the phenomenon that almost demand further investigation. Why do they do it and how long do they go on adding to their repertoire?
One reflection, however, stands out for me. Mimesis is a name we give to the reproduction of the world in some symbolic form. We often think of this skill at copying as both the bed-rock of art and a talent that is uniquely defining of our species. However, isn’t this precisely what a redstart is doing, conjuring moments and encounters from its long odyssey to and from Africa and rendering it in sound form? It is mimesis of the most sophisticated kind.
If we travel back in our imaginations to the caves of southern France where these mimetic gifts first emerged in our species, what we find are cave walls covered in beautiful representations of animals — bisons, horses, deers, mammoths — that shared the world of our Palaeolithic forebears. What those ‘artists’ copied in their paintings was a living community of neighbours. Should we not consider the possibility that redstarts have been practising exactly the same gifts — art, if you will — in the way that we do still? It may be a matter of manipulating the avian organ of sound, the syrinx, rather than our hands with their opposable thumbs. Yet the neural capabilities to conjure experiences that are not present and to revive them in symbolic format are identical.
There is a wonderful moment in Buxton’s The Redstart where he writes: ‘One of the chief joys of watching them in prison was that they inhabited another world than I… They lived only in the moment without foresight and with memory only of things of immediate practical concern to them.’ The sounds and sights of his redstarts were clearly a deep reassurance to the poet and prisoner-of-war, but I wonder whether the birds were really as different as he imagined?
