Please note that this bonus material section is not a true article itself. There's no real logical order that leads to a conclusion. The information we gather here is meant to further illustrate our Dutch Birding article.

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1. Preface 

In Dutch Birding 40.3 (2018) our identification article on hybrid males (Western) Black x Common Redstart vs. phoenicuroides Eastern Black Redstart was published. Our conclusion is that based on new and old features, nearly all males can be identified without using the wing formula, that was described so well by Steijn (2005). Furthermore the article shows that there's very little overlap in their temporal distribution: when the Eastern Blacks arrive, hybrids seem to be very rare (and vice versa). Together with Bernd Nicolai we published an article in British Birds 112 (2019) about hybrid redstarts in Europe, dealing with breeding, occurence, migration, vocalisations, plumage variation etc. This page further illustrates plumage variation and ID with new material.

 

2. The bonus material

The article is quite compact. We however have loads of extra material. And space on a website is not as limited as in a magazine. And while lower quality shots can be very instructive,often they cannot be printed. The main focus here is to present extra photographic material: something I often long for when I read an article. 

 

Furthermore our sample (links to pictures) is downloadable for those who are interested to either draw their own conclusions, or to check ours.  If you have any comments on our findings whatsoever, please do not hesitate to let us know.

 

3. Download our sample info!
We analysed the plumages of 62 male hybrids. For the temporal distribution we analyses 65 male hybrids.

At the time these we all hybrids we were able to find, but since then we found quite a few more but so far, none of these birds seems to challenge our findings. 

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Download the dataset that we used for the article here. See for yourself if you agree with our findings! 

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All (accepted) European records of Eastern Black Redstarts were gathered by Łukasz Ławicki. These were published in a separate article in DB 40:3 (Ebels et al 2018). 

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4. Wing structure (how did it work it again?)

Since it's about plumage, the wing structure is not explained into detail in the article. For a longer explanation, see Stein (2005).

 

To freshen up: two features are important: the presence (and size) or absence of an emargination on p6 (often difficult to see in the field) and the visible part of p5 and p6 (numbered outside in).  

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Black Redstarts (incl. Eastern) have p6 emarginated, whereas Common doesn't. This feature is very variable in hybrids, but if absent, or very small, this is a good indication of hybrid origin.

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Easier to see in good photographs are the visible parts of p5 and p6.

First of all in Common the wing tip is often formed by p4, whereas in Black this is p5. So if p4 forms the tip, this is implicates a hybrid origin. Now very roughly, in Common the visible part of p5 and p6 is more or less equally long (Figure 2).  In all Black Redstarts however, the visible part of p6 is obviously longer, often twice (but even more is possible) as long as p5. See figure 3. 

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Hybrids take a middle position, with overlap. When reminiscent of Common, or generally too small for a(n Eastern) Black, this is a strong indication of hybrid origin. The primary spacing of all Dutch records (until spring 2018) can be found in table 1.