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, with a population of 1,000–3,000 pairs and a rising trend; 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 →