Red Startling

Age before beauty? Male American Restarts get beautiful with age. This active and vocal warbler offers a few lessons in evolution. First, it’s a flasher. By drooping its wings or fanning its tail, the redstart flashes orange or yellow. The maneuver is believed to flush prey from vegetation, which the warbler can glean or snatch in flight. And unlike many other warblers, which tend to acquire adult plumage by their first birthday, one-year-old male restarts resemble females (as in my image below), with gray heads and yellowish patches rather than the black-and-orange patterns of adult males, shown nicely here in a photo that Joan Thompson captured (with her point-and-shoot camera and her binoculars) during a Vermont Bird Tours outing with me in May. (Blog readers may recall Joan’s delightful photos of chickadees and other birds feeding from her hand.)

Anyway, these yearling males establish territories but don’t often attract a mate. That plumage is a dead giveaway that he’s not yet worldly, perhaps not yet worth a female’s investment of time and energy. The older, orange-and-black males are dominant over yearlings and more likely to “get the girl.” So, it turns out, at least among American Restarts, age does matter.