10,000 Birds

Last week I wrote a short post about a visit I made to New York’s Central Park with Corey, in which I referred to a close encounter with a small flock of one of my favourite birds: Cedar Waxwings Bombycilla cedrorum. To save myself a little time (a two-year-old is demanding my attention) I’m going to copy and paste a paragraph from that post describing what I saw - “I was just thinking of starting the slog back to the hotel when I caught out of the corner of my eye two Cedar Waxwings flit across the path towards a patch of trees to my left. Nothing unusual in that, of course, but on catching them up I found that two were actually thirty, and that they were perching at eye-level or foraging on the ground almost at my feet, sorting out seeds from the decaying leaf-litter like sparrows rather than staying high out of reach in a berry-laden tree. It may well be that North American birders are used to such fantastic views of these silken passerines, but I’m most certainly not, and I spent a wonderful hour or so following these beautiful, streamlined birds, getting views that I will never forget - and photographs I’ll probably never get the chance to take again. For proof of that you’ll just have to come back when I’ve had an opportunity to put a post together…”

Well, finally, I’ve “put a post together” - which basically meant sorting out and re-sizing a pile of photos and writing a little text - so without any more chatter, here it is:

Cedar Waxwings breed from Canada south to California with wanderers [and Waxwings are good at wandering] making it into Central America. Slim birds with shaggy crests and dark “bandit” masks, adults have the red “waxy” blobs on the secondaries for which the species (and the similar Bohemian Waxwing B. garrulus) are named. In the photos below, therefore, birds without the “waxy” blobs are first-year birds, those with them are the accompanying adults.

(Note the orangey tone to this bird’s tail - plumage colour is often related to diet, so presumably this bird has been feeding on berries packed with caretonoids)

For a previous post looking at the differences between the two Waxwing species in North America please go to Cedar Waxing vs Bohemian Waxwing