Daurian Redstart

Phoenicurus auroreus (Pallas, 1776)

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The Daurian Redstart is a species of the Far East and South Siberia, the range of which is rather poorly known. It inhabits edges of open forests in the south of the Siberian forest zone, as well as gardens and floodplain shrubs. The species is also found in cultivated landscapes.

A.Ya. Tugarinov classified the Daurian Redstart as a species of the Kansk-Nizhneudinsk zoogeographic area (Tugarinov 1927). In May 1976, the species was seen in the Abakan River valley, and Yu.I. Kustov observed a pair of redstarts evincing breeding behavior in the Minusinsk pine forest belt (Prokofyev 1987). Evidence suggests that the species may be expanding westwards, and observations to the west of Central Siberia lend support to this supposition: on May 30,1937, wandering Daurian Redstarts were encountered in Barabinsk (Gluzsky 1946) and in Tomsk on May 28, 1974 (Gyngazov and Milovidov 1977). E.A. Krutovskaya described a hybridizing pair consisting of a male Daurian Redstart and a female Redstart that was feeding nestlings in a nest box near a building of the meteorological station in the Stolby Reserve (Krutovskaya 1958).

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