I know this isn’t a seasonally relevant addition to 10,000 Birds, but Corey’s great post about flycatching Cedar Waxwings yesterday reminded me of an encounter I had two years ago with the Cedar’s larger and more northerly cousins - the Bohemian Waxwing (or just THE Waxwing as we lazy Brits tend to call it). Common some winters on Britain’s east coast when hungry flocks fan out over the North Sea from Scandinavia following a poor berry crop Bohemian Waxwings arrive in scattered and seemingly random locations in the UK but rarely get over to my side of the country, and even more rarely seem to do so when I’m at home. It’s party-time when they do I can tell you!

Hopefully most (if not virtually all) 10,000 Birds readers won’t have seen the photos below and will forgive me for re-posting them here in the middle of August…

• “January 28th 2005:
  Finally: good weather, me, and part of the UK’s largest Waxwing invasion for - well - for a hundred years, all co-incide - on this occasion in the glamorous location of “the rowan trees behind the Old Tesco’s, Trowbridge” (a small and frankly not remarkably interesting market town in Wiltshire, about twenty miles from where I live).

  I’d not had a moment to go and see these beauties before today (flying and other commitments had kept us apart), but at last a day dawned when I wasn’t serving tea and coffee to dehydrated drunks at 30,000′, the rain was drenching some other part of the country, AND the waxwings had made their way from the east coast where they’d arrived a month or so before and reached us waxwing-starved west country folk! Hurrah…

  By the time I got to the “old Tesco’s car-park” the flock had dropped away from 300 birds yesterday, to about 90 early morning, and then down to about 15 - but as a flock of one is still a wonderful thing to behold, I’m not complaining in the least. A constantly fluttering, trilling flock of 15 Bohemian Waxwings performing just over your head is a truly unforgettable sight. Made up of both the stunningly colourful adults and the less well-marked juveniles (which lack both white tips to the inner primaries and the red “waxy” appendages the birds are named for) this small flock spent much of the morning literally no more than thirty feet away from an endless procession of over-excited birders and the local teenagers (who you just knew were itching to come back when no-one else was around and let loose with a BB gun), and inexplicably - as is the way with waxwings - left during the night for ‘rowans anew’.

  I know this is hardly an original question, but just how on earth do these superb birds find the rowan trees they so love in town centres in places like Trowbridge? If they fly at night it’s dark: if they fly during the day there are shoppers everywhere, noise and cars, and blokes with cameras…amazing…”

All photographs © Charlie Moores.