Red-breasted flycatcher | Ficedula parva

Voice

The call is what matters here: a dry rattling trrrt strongly recalling a Wren but shorter and softer, often alternating with a short hard hit or chik. Anyone who hears that in a coastal copse in October should stop walking. The song, heard in eastern Europe and occasionally from a spring male holding territory in a western wood, is a short clear whistled run that opens like a Chiffchaff and then falls away like the end of a willow warbler's phrase: tsi-tsi-tsi-tyoo-tyoo-tyoo, three to four seconds long and surprisingly loud for so small a bird. The male sings high in the canopy, throat puffed and tail spread.

Identification

Europe's smallest flycatcher, barely bigger than a Goldcrest with a fat head. The shape is a robin's: rounded body, big round head, short bill and a large dark eye in a plain flat face, with a conspicuous pale eye-ring that makes the eye look larger still. Grey-brown above, off-white below with a buff wash on the breast sides. The clinching mark is in the tail: black, with a large white patch at the base of the outer feathers, so that every time the bird flies two white flashes light up as though a miniature wheatear were leaving. It also holds the tail cocked, wings drooped, and flicks it briefly down — that alone is a pointer. The old male in spring has an orange-red throat and upper breast blending diffusely into the white, framed by grey head sides; females, young males and every autumn bird lack the orange entirely.

Confusion species

Spotted flycatcher is the comparison most often needed on the autumn coast — see its own page. That bird is a third bigger, far longer in wing and tail, streaked on crown and breast, and has a plain one-coloured tail with no white; it sits and waits rather than flicking. Pied Flycatcher is more compact, with a big white wing patch and white down the whole length of the tail sides, not just at the base. A Robin is larger, longer-legged and works the ground. That leaves Taiga Flycatcher from Siberia, not covered in this guide but the reason to look carefully: it has black rather than brown uppertail-coverts, an all-dark bill, and in the male a small orange throat patch sharply bounded by grey. Where doubt remains, the call decides it.

Habitat

On the breeding grounds tall, mature, shady broadleaved and mixed woodland — beech, hornbeam, oak — with a closed canopy, an open understorey and plenty of thin bare twigs at mid-height to hunt from. It feeds strikingly high, usually above ten metres, and behaves up there more like a leaf warbler than a flycatcher. On migration it is far less particular: coastal copses, hawthorn and elder scrub behind the dunes, gardens, churchyards and dock plantations.

Range and movements

A breeder of eastern Europe, from eastern Germany, Czechia, Poland and the Baltic states east to the Urals, north into central Finland and Sweden and south into the Carpathians and northern Greece; thin and patchy towards the west. The migration route is remarkable: almost the entire population winters in Pakistan and India, a direction hardly any other European songbird takes. Along the North Sea coasts it is a scarce but near-annual autumn migrant, best looked for on offshore islands and headlands from mid-September to late October; spring males occasionally hold territory for weeks in mature woodland well west of the breeding range without ever nesting.

• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Between mid-September and late October, on an easterly or north-easterly airflow, on an island or a headland. Walk the inner dune edge and the hawthorn, sea-buckthorn and elder thickets and listen for the dry rattle; only then start looking. If it flies, watch the tail rather than the bird: two white patches at the tail base and the job is done. If it stays put, check the eye-ring, the short bill and the habit of holding the tail up. In spring it is worth standing under an old beech wood in eastern Poland or Slovakia in May and listening for the descending whistle; the bird sits high, and you will not see it until you know where it is.

Conservation status

Least Concern, with a large population running from central Europe deep into Siberia and, at the western edge of the range, increasing rather than falling. The species depends on old, tall woodland with a closed canopy and disappears where such woods are thinned or replanted. It has never bred in the countries where most western observers meet it, so the numbers recorded there say nothing about how the species is faring and a good deal about how many observers know the call.