The Black Redstart (Phoenicurus ochruros) is a small songbird of industrial sites and city rooftops, 14–15 cm long with a wingspan of 23–26 cm and a weight of just 14–20 grams. The male is sooty black across body and face, with a pale wing patch and a glowing rust-red tail and rump that it often trembles nervously, as redstarts typically do; the female is more uniformly greyish-brown but shares the same rust-red tail. Unlike the closely related Common Redstart, the male lacks a white forehead and rust-coloured breast, making the two easy to tell apart.
Originally a bird of rocky and mountainous terrain, the Black Redstart has adapted readily to urban life, treating buildings, industrial areas and quarries as a substitute for cliffs and boulder fields, and has expanded its range northward across Europe as a result. In Sweden it breeds in the south and centre of the country, and the 2025 Swedish Red List estimates the population at around 940 breeding individuals, suspects a decline over the past ten years and lists the species as Vulnerable (VU). Good sites include harbour and industrial districts in Malmö and Gothenburg. It nests in cavities and sheltered ledges on buildings — under roofs, on beams, in ventilation openings and wall cracks — mirroring the rock crevices used in its ancestral habitat, and a female typically lays 4–6 eggs, with both parents feeding the young; a favourable season can bring two broods. It feeds on insects, larvae and spiders picked from the ground, walls and rooftops, or caught in short aerial sallies from a high lookout perch, with berries and small fruits added to the diet in late summer and autumn. The song is distinctive — a short phrase opening with whistled notes and ending in a raspy, scraping passage likened to raked gravel — and birds are present from April to October.
Read about this species in Swedish →