Phoenicurus (Redstarts)

Phoenicurus phoenicurus (Family: Muscicapidae; common name:  Redstart)

The Common Redstart or just Redstart is a small passerine bird that was formerly classed as a member of the Thrush family (Turdidae), but is now more generally considered to be an Old World flycatcher (Muscicapidae). It is a summer visitor in Europe. Its winter quarters are in north Africa (1), although it can also be seen in the southern Mediterranean countries – as the one shown here, photo taken in Strophylia (West Peloponnese, Greece). Strophylia is one of the 11 Ramsar sites of Greece. It combines the largest stone pine forest in Greece along with lagoons, marshes, mudflats, seashore, sand dunes and the lime stone Black Mountains, all composing a place of splendid beauty as well as great ecological importance. When we saw this bird it was already past 3 pm on the New Year Eve of 2009, so the sun was not strong and light was low. Our first attempts to take a nice photo of the bird were unsuccessful since the 70-300 mm on the D2x proved to suffer from low shutter speeds. An additional problem was that the bird (as with all birds in this region) will only allow you to get as close as they feel safe, which is rarely closer than 15 m. We needed to get much closer to get a good photo of a bird that size. We observed that the birds did not have a problem with moving cars which seemed familiar to them but when you tried to open the door they would immediately establish the 15 m war zone. Therefore we decided to change camera and get the D300 which would offer us the benefit of noise-free high ISO settings, a high shutter speed and the 1.5x cropping factor. One of the birds decided to rest on a tree branch about 12 m away. Instead of taking photos of it, we got in the car and moved slowly towards the bird stopping every 2 meters and taking a photo. This way we managed to get as close as 3 m from the bird and got the picture shown here.

Photos by Marina Parha and George J. Reclos

Shooting Data:

(1) Wikipedia 

Phoenicurus ochruros (Family: Muscicapidae; common name:  Black redstart)

The environmental reserve in Strophylia is an extremely interesting place to take photos of wildlife. In addition to the wild swans, the cormorants, the grebes and other birds who live near or in water one can find all sorts of small birds happily chiming and jumping from branch to branch in the dense vegetation. We saw a pair of black redstards on a branch and approach to take a photo. The male, quite edgy, flew away instantly, despite all our efforts to approach carefully in order not to scare them. The female, braver than her mate, stayed on ignoring our presence.

Photos by Mahi Goula and George Parchas

Shooting Data: