As no longer a casual birdwatcher but a still naïve birdspotter, I used to flick through my illustrated ‘Book of British Birds’ looking for possible targets.
Blackcap, pied flycatcher, redstart, whitethroat and wheatear all struck me as reasonably common birds I had never seen.
One March a blackcap turned up in my mother’s garden and pied flycatcher was an easy spot in June near Loch Ken. A casual walk at Balcary Bay had me really excited when both whitethroat and wheatear turned up on the same day, in the gorse and on a stone dyke respectively, both birds I had searched for unsuccessfully at several other places. And it was just a week or two after I had seen a redpoll there too.
So that left the redstart. As I surveyed the bright, even slightly exotic colouring of the male in pictures and videos, it somehow seemed appropriate that the prettiest bird had been kept to last…
Apparently the male redstart likes to sing from the top of a mature oak, so I repeatedly scanned the oaks around the reserves at Ken Dee Marshes and Wood of Cree and saw nothing. The local vet told me he had tried too and also failed. One of the signs at Ken Dee suggested areas where redstarts occur, but noted that they can be hard to see.
A walking holiday Germany produced a couple more first time sightings including crested tit, marsh tit and BLACK redstart, but no redstarts.
The call of the redstart begins as if it’s going to burst into a tremendous bout of warbling but sort of disintegrates into a series of indifferent twitterings. I also became familiar with the songs of various other birds I had not previously been able to recognise. I was fairly certain I had never heard a redstart. At Ken Dee Marshes, I also noted that redstart was not at all a common entry in the log of birds kept by visitors. Maybe ‘can be hard to see’ really meant ‘only pass through occasionally’.
I didn’t manage another trip to the reserves during the rest of that summer. But I did drop in on another suspect area at St Ann’s on the Raehills Estate one evening. After scouring the oaks on either side of the bank unsuccessfully, I gave up looking and rambled for pleasure, finding a man-made pond on the edge of the estate that contained some hefty golden orfe.
Further upstream was a derelict cottage. I decided to head back down to the river and saw a large herd of young deer galloping around a triangular compound near the water. As I approach several of them vaulted the compound fence and headed upriver in disarray.
On 9th June this year I had planned another run to Newton Stewart in the morning but found myself in a DIY Centre buying a door instead. Rather than lose the whole day, I opted for a quick lunchtime trip to St Ann’s, just on the off chance.
I knew from the outset that I would head for the pond with the orfe and then the compound near the derelict house, with a view to seeing what the Kinnel Water looked like further to the North.
One thing I didn’t want to do was follow the main path under St. Ann’s Bridge, which attracts a lot of rubbish thrown down from passing cars, so I headed through the main estate entrance and along the road.
A car passed me in the other direction, its driver eying me with some suspicion. He stopped, reversed up and asked me if I was birdwatching, no doubt noticing the binoculars. I told him I was looking for a track down to the river to look for redstarts.
“Never seen any here myself,” he said in a Yorkshire accent, going on to make it plain that I had just passed a track that lead to the river.
So I went down the track passing various gadgets clearly set up to trap beast and bird and reasoning that he hadn’t wanted me nosing around the estate grounds. Then I followed the bankside path northwards along the Kinnel Water where it becomes a rocky stream hiding deep pools that are no doubt salmon runs in autumn – another reason to beware of casual visitors to the estate.
I was determined to enjoy this short walk, regardless of the birdwatching result and so diverted back onto the estate where I knew the orfe pond was, but it was so weeded over it was impossible to see if they were still there. It was a curious expanse of man-made, winding ponds of no real depth, punctuated by small islands with rickety bridges and numerous decoy herons. Clearly, the landowners feared that other forms of poaching were going on.
I returned to the riverside path where it leads up through the bankside rocks and trees. Several obstructions above deer height and numerous hoof prints betrayed its main use. Emerging again into the mottled sunshine, I noticed signs that the derelict house was showing signs of intended renovation. Ahead of me lay the clearing with the triangular paddock fence and its meadow, currently free of deer.
I headed down to the attractive stretch of tree-lined river behind the paddock. My plan was to forage upwards along the bank and see if it took me into an oak wood where redstarts might be found. As I was still some distance from the bank, I saw a grey bird of average size emerge from a sycamore on the opposite bank. My curiosity aroused and with no clear idea what I might have seen, I decided to linger and look upstream for a minute or two. Momentarily, another grey bird flickered out from beneath the trees.
I’m not quite sure why I immediately thought of redstarts. Could it have been that I caught a flash of the giveaway red tail, or did I subconsciously register that the plentiful birdsong in the glade contained the right clues?
Dismissing the idea as wishful thinking, I settled down on a convenient tree branch and decided to sit it out for a quarter of an hour, keeping as still as possible. Something interesting was happening and if, against the odds, I did happen to see a redstart, so much the better.
And there they were – several of them. Fluttering around the tree branches, criss-crossing the river and settling on the bankside stones to look for flies. Most of them were females in their dowdy pale grey but with the unmistakeable red tail feathers that are common to no other UK woodland bird. There were males too, more cautious, only allowing enough time for their gaudy mix of red, white and black to be glimpsed but not closely examined.
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| Spot the Redstart Difficulty Level: Very Hard |
I had not read that small streams were a good place to look for redstarts. Although they were nearby, there were no oak trees in sight on the bank. The larger trees were mainly beeches apart from the large sycamore opposite.
Yet for this little river glade on this time and day, redstarts were the dominant bird as they outnumbered wagtails and blackbirds, a sole pied flycatcher and one greater spotted woodpecker that, to my surprise, also landed on the rocks on the far bank.
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| Spot the Flycatcher Difficulty Level: Moderate |
I forded the stream further up and walked the path on the other side, but apart from that one area there were no further redstarts to be seen.
As I returned to St Ann’s Bridge, I reflected that bird spotting seems to be about three fifths intent and two fifths accident. Another thing that I have noticed when bird watching is that nothing may happen for a long time, then several things happen in quick succession.
For on another walking holiday in Germany ten days later, the first three birds I saw were – you’ve guessed it - redstarts.
June 2009
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