3 days ago
Country diary: Redstarts are a master of the cover version
It was at this Plantlife reserve five years ago that I first realised how common redstarts, among our most beautiful summer migrants, are also astonishing vocal mimics.
Understanding of the subject has been patchy, which is strange, given that as long ago as 1845 William Yarrell noted how males closely imitate the notes of the sparrow and chaffinch, and the songs of the garden warbler and lesser whitethroat. I can confirm three of those species. He reported that a Mr Sweet had trained his captive redstart to reproduce the Copenhagen Waltz!
One reason why we've largely ignored the redstart's gift for imitation is because the song phrases are so short. They last just two or three seconds and are delivered at an average of 6.5 a minute. Yet any lack of sustained musicality is more than compensated for by the vocalist's persistence. One male here sang continuously above my head for 100 minutes, delivering 650 phrases. In a whole day it must produce thousands of song units, and across a full spring possibly hundreds of thousands. Almost all contain snippets of other birds' tunes.
Perhaps the most moving during my spring of research – in which I've listed 52 mimicked species – is the corroboration of a 2021 encounter, when I heard a Derbyshire redstart do a rendition of European bee-eater calls. This year, I've heard it several times, and it's never less than shiver-inducing. Let's zoom into outer space now to look down on Deep Dale to grasp its full significance.
There is first the neural, vocal achievement of the original author, the bee-eater, which masters and shares this note across its entire population – a beautifully soft, remarkably far-carrying burred sound. Then there is the redstart, which brings all that bee-eater neural processing from the Mediterranean or Africa, and reproduces it precisely as part of its own Derbyshire songscape. And who knows for how long redstarts have been enriching the collective mind of Deep Dale with this vocal traffic? Perhaps thousands of years. If ochre and charcoal animals drawn by humans on cave walls 30,000 years ago are art, then this consummate mimesis by a redstart is surely no less an achievement nor less artful.
Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
