November 3, 2006

Cedar Waxwings

Absent most of the summer, small flocks of Cedar Waxwings began showing up a couple of weeks ago. They seem to have an innate sense of when berries are beginning to ripen. I usually hear them first ≠ lisping little voices at the upper range of human hearing. Maybe we're only hearing part of what they say. After all, like it or not, bird calls and songs were not designed for human ears, but for each other.

I watched them last month in a small flock as they polished off the last of the elderberries on a hillside above Jewel Lake on one of the last truly warm days of October. In the low morning sun, they presented an elegant profile, sleek and rakish with their swept-back crests. Backlit by the sun, the narrow

band on each tail glowed bright yellow. In the northeast, where waxwings feed on a certain planted honeysuckle (Lonicera morrowii) which is rich in red pigments, the yellow band turns orange.

Last year, waxwings in huge flocks attracted the attention of even the most casual birders as they passed overhead with a whir of wings, often numbering in the dozens, sometimes in the hundreds. Even in small flocks, they favor close formations, fllying into a tree as the tree itself was vacuuming them in, soon to eject them out again to continue their roving.

When a laden berry bush is sighted, they descend on fluttering wings, their conversation of sibilant sounds quickening with the excitement of the feast. Sometimes they are in the company of robins who also participate in these bacchanals. But robins, in contrast to the elegant, graceful waxwings, appear bulky and even ungainly, prone to crashing into nearby windows whether from inebriation or overexcitement, one can't be sure.

Waxwings sitting in a row on a branch may pass a berry back and forth until the game ends when one of them swallows it. The passing of a berry back and forth is also part of the breeding ritual between a male and female.

As the most frugivorous (fruit-eating) of all North American birds whose diet consists of at least 80% ripe fruit, their behavior resembles the tropical fruit eaters who are also intensely social, traveling and feeding in large flocks and even in nesting season maintaining loose groups. But waxwings themselves are one of a small species with only three members ≠ the Cedar Waxwings of our climes, the more northerly Bohemian Waxwings, and the Japanese Waxwings of eastern Asia.

The name waxwing refers to the bright red waxy appendages that are often attached to the tips of their secondary feathers which may have a role in attracting mates. The 'cedar' part may refer to their association with conifers, in particular junipers whose berries once made up much of their diet before all the ornamental plants and orchards became an important source of food and brought about an increase in their populations. Waxwings are most numerous in the Great Lakes region and in the Northeast.

As a mostly sedentary person with a small family, I have a special admiration for these masked wanderers. The poet, Robert Francis, liked them so well, that in his poem "Waxwings" he imagines himself as one of them: "Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings chat on a February berry bush in the sun, I am one." "To sun, to feast, and to converse and all together ≠ for this I have abandoned all my other lives."

- Phila Rogers