Daurian Redstart Phoenicurus auroreus 北紅尾鴝
Category I. Common winter visitor to lightly wooded areas.
IDENTIFICATION
Dec. 2008, Martin Hale.
14-15 cm. The male is distinctive with its silvery-grey crown and nape, black face, throat, mantle and wings, and orange underparts and rump. There is a large white patch in the wing. The dark tail is edged with orange.
Jan. 2011, D.A. Diskin.
The female has greyish-brown upperparts and brownish-buff underparts. The rump and outer-tail feathers are orange. There is a white patch in the wing; on rare occasions this patch can be obscured or absent.
VOCALISATIONS
Frequently vocalises uttering a high-pitched ‘see’ in which a terminal fall in pitch may be heard or a ‘tuk’, uttered either singly or consecutively. The two calls may be run together.
May be confused with similar calls of Red-flanked Bluetail when the two are present in the same area. Compared to the bluetail, the high-pitched call is slightly higher-pitched and sounds even in pitch, while the ‘tuk’ call is higher in pitch. When the two are uttered as a pair of notes, the gap between them is shorter.
DISTRIBUTION & HABITAT PREFERENCE
Occurs in open-canopy woodland and shrubland, lightly-wooded parks, and village and agricultural areas with sufficient trees, generally occupying only the edge of closed-canopy habitats. Widespread throughout HK including the outlying islands, the percentage of 1km squares occupied by Daurian Redstart showed no significant change between the 2001-05 and 2016-19 winter atlas surveys.
OCCURRENCE
Daurian Redstart is a common winter visitor with extreme dates of 29 September and 2 May. Figure 1 shows that it is rare before the last week of October, from when it is generally common until the third week of February. Peak numbers occur from the second week of November to the first week of December, which is probably explained by the presence of passage migrants; there is a smaller peak in the last week of January and the first week of February, which presumably reflects cold-weather movements of birds from the north. Numbers gradually decline from the last week of February as wintering birds depart, and that decline is more marked from the end of March through April. It is rare after the middle of April.
Usually occurs in ones or twos, but several birds may be scattered around favoured areas. The highest count reported is 48 in a large area of southwest Lantau on 17 November 2013. The highest number at a more typical site is at least 30 at Pak Sha O on 5 February 1995, part of an influx of Turdidae species into HK after a cold surge from the north.
In general, there has been a marked increase in the reported number of Daurian Redstarts since 2012/13. The extent of the increase in the sum of weekly counts per winter period from 27 in 1999/2000 to 1507 in 2019/20 is substantial and is almost certainly due to increased observer activity and better reporting. The use of eBird allows regularly seen and widespread species such as this to be recorded more assiduously, whereas previously, because of this status, it would not be reported comprehensively. Figure 2, which charts the peak count per winter period, also suggests the scale of increase is not so substantial.
Vaughan and Jones (1913), Hutson (1930) and Herklots (1953) noted Daurian Redstart to be a winter visitor, commoner in some years than others.
BEHAVIOUR, FORAGING & DIET
Usually solitary, it perches prominently on bushes and man-made structures such as fences and posts where it frequently shivers its tail. It is not particularly shy and is sometimes found close to human habitation. A male at Tai Po Kau Headland for about 16 days in November 1959 repeatedly flew at a window in a house, “obviously attracted by his own reflection”. It was also seen to bring berries to ‘feed’ this reflection of itself (Barretto 1960). Single wintering birds also regularly visited a bird bath on the balcony of a house at Shuen Wan between 2013 and 2020. It can be particularly approachable on cold days.
Insectivorous in the main, it darts down from its perch to seize prey on the ground or, less frequently, in the air (Hutson 1930). It also takes fruit and has been observed eating Schleffera heptaphylla, Psychotria asiatica and Lantana camara.
RANGE & SYSTEMATICS
Two subspecies are recognised. P. a. auroreus breeds in south-central Siberia, north and northeast Mongolia east to Amurland and Ussuriland, and south to North Korea and northeast China; there is also a small population in central Japan. It winters in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, southeast China and north Vietnam. In China it breeds from Heilongjiang and Jilin southeast to Shanxi, Henan, Hubei and Jiangxi, and winters south of the Yangtze River floodplain. The second subspecies, P.a. leucopterus breeds in central China (east Qinghai, northwest Gansu and Shaanxi south to southeast Tibet and north Yunnan), and winters from the eastern Himalayas east to northern Thailand and northern Indochina (Cheng 1987, Collar 2020, Liu and Chen 2020).
CONSERVATION STATUS
IUCN: Least Concern. Population trend stable.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Barretto, A. O. (1960) Note on a Daurian Redstart at Taipo Kau. Hong Kong Bird Report 1959: 73.
Cheng, T. H. (1987). A Synopsis of the Avifauna of China. Science Press, Beijing.
Collar, N. (2020). Daurian Redstart (Phoenicurus auroreus), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, D. A. Christie, and E. de Juana, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.daured1.01
Herklots, G. A. C. (1953). Hong Kong Birds. South China Morning Post, Hong Kong.
Hutson, H. P. W. (1930). The birds of Hong Kong. Turdidae (Thrushes). Hong Kong Naturalist 1: 48-50.
Liu, Y. and Y. H. Chen (eds) (2020). The CNG Field Guide to the Birds of China (in Chinese). Hunan Science and Technology Publication House.
Vaughan, R. E. and K. H. Jones (1913). The birds of Hong Kong, Macao and the West River or Si Kiang in South-East China, with special reference to their nidification and seasonal movements. Ibis 1913: 17-76, 163-201, 351-384.
