Charming Bird

Pierre Jaquet-Droz built singing birds and writing androids in the 1770s that still work today and still draw crowds in Neuchatel. The Charming Bird is the house's attempt to put that mechanism on a wrist, and it took five years of development to do it.

Press the pusher and a miniature bellows drives air through a sapphire tube. The pitch is controlled by a piston moving inside that tube, generating a genuine whistle rather than the plucked gong of a repeater. Nothing else in watchmaking makes sound this way.

While it sings, the bird under the dome turns, opens its beak and beats its wings. The animation is driven off a dedicated barrel so the timekeeping is untouched by the performance.

In red gold with a black grand feu dial and the automaton bubble at six, on green alligator, this is one of the least reproducible objects any manufacture currently makes.

Production is measured in single figures per year. Most collectors will never handle one.