The Common Redstart (Phoenicurus phoenicurus) is a colourful small passerine with a constantly quivering, rust-red tail, a member of the flycatcher family and an insect-eating long-distance migrant that breeds across large parts of Sweden in summer. The male in full plumage is among the most colourful of the region's small birds, showing a black face and chin, a bright white forehead, a blue-grey crown and back, and a warm, rust-orange breast; the female is far more subdued in brownish-grey tones but shares the male's key mark — the rust-red tail. Both sexes flick and quiver the tail almost constantly, a lively habit that makes an excellent field mark even at a distance. It measures about 13–14 cm in length, has a wingspan of 20–24 cm and weighs only 12–20 grams.
The song is a short, soft and somewhat wistful phrase that opens with a few clear, falling notes before often breaking into a scratchy, trilling or mimicking passage; the call is a clear, questioning "huit," often followed by a dry, smacking "teck-teck." The male sings readily in the early morning from an exposed perch high in a tree. The Common Redstart occurs across almost all of Sweden except the bare mountains, with a large population numbering in the hundreds of thousands of pairs; it is a long-distance migrant, arriving in late April and May and leaving in August–September to winter in sub-Saharan Africa, and it favours old, open pine and mixed forest as well as parks and gardens with cavity trees. It is a hole-nester, using tree cavities, wall crevices or nest boxes, and the female lays 6–7 eggs and incubates alone while both parents feed the chicks with insects; it readily takes to half-open boxes or ones with an entrance of about 45 mm, and its diet is dominated by insects caught in flight or picked from the ground and foliage, supplemented with berries in late summer.
Read about this species in Swedish →