OC Birder Girl: Cedar Waxwing--Bombycilla cedrorum

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Cedar Waxwing--Bombycilla cedrorum

Cedar Waxwings at Shipley Nature Center in Huntington Central Park. The entire group numbered about 50 birds.
Cedar Waxwings are about berries. They eat insects, but they are berry aficionados. All About Birds calls them "the most frugivorous birds in North America." They surpass American Robins who also eat a lot of fruit. Cedar Waxwings will eat fruit--especially berries--until they are stuffed. And sometimes when they eat fermented berries, they fall off the trees in a drunken stupor. Fermented berries have even indirectly caused their deaths.

Courtesy of the US Fish and Game Service

Cedar Waxwings will pass berries from bird to bird until one of them eats it. They are very sociable and gregarious. They travel and feed in large groups, feeding and grooming each other. They eat berries from trees, bushes, and vines. When there are no berries, they eat flowers and pass them around in the same fashion. They also eat insects.

Courtesy of the US Fish and Game Service (Photographer David Menke)

Cedar Waxwings are so named because they have waxy substances on their wingtips and on the tips of their tails. The wingtips are red and the tip of the tail is yellow (orange if they eat a certain type of introduced honeysuckle). The cedar part of their name comes from the fact that they eat lots of cedar berries.

Courtesy of the US Fish and Game Service. (Photographer--David Menke). Notice the waxy yellow at the end of the tail feathers.

Cedar waxwings will sit and eat berries or will forage on the wing as above. Cedar Waxwings also catch insects in midair like a flycatcher. They will also pick insects off vegetation.

Courtesy of the US Fish and Game Service

It is no surprise that passing berries is part of this fruit-loving bird's courtship. And like any wedding, there is a little dancing involved. Male and female look alike and share nest duty. They stay together throughout the breeding season, building the nest and raising the young. Smart birds, they apparently recognize Cowbird eggs in their nests, and will desert the nest, damage the cowbird egg, or try to eject it from the nest. How effective their efforts are is not clear since they damage their own eggs sometimes in the process, and they will often desert their nest if it is parasitized by Cowbirds. Other species are more successful at getting rid of Cowbird eggs according to a study listed below.

You Tube Video

Widely know as gregarious gluttons, these loud, chatty birds will descend on anything with berries and pick it clean. Like avian locusts, they have been looked at unfavorably by farmers and orchard owners. They eat cedar berries, cherries, choke cherries, mulberries, hackberries and more. At one time they were allowed to be shot as a threat to agriculture. And they still face getting a pants full of buckshot or worse today. One strawberry farmer and his crew descended on a Walmart in Louisiana and bought out all their shotgun shells in 2005. He was hoping to save his crop. Don't know what happened to him and his crew, but Cedar Waxwings are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty.

Great views of Cedar Waxwings in this You Tube Video by Bill Meier--replaces previous video.

Cedar Waxwings are beautiful and fun to watch. They appear somewhat erratically depending on the available food. If you see a flock when you are out birding in Orange County, enjoy them, you never know when they will pop up again. I have seen them this year in Huntington Central Park in Huntington Beach, and years ago at Oak Canyon Nature Center. They have been seen in San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary and other locations in Orange County. In the San Fernando Valley, I have seen them at the Holy Spirit Center in Encino. Follow the berries.