Listening, the key to detecting cedar waxwings
People who pay attention to birds come to love the changing seasons, and have favorite moments in the world of birds that mark the calendar in their minds with days of celebration. Many devout birders think of fall as the time for passing migrants: today may be the day when they see a rare warbler they will not see again for years.
Many backyard birdwatchers eagerly await the return of the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, which are even now announcing their arrival with clear, whistled songs. At this particular moment, I think my favorite sign of fall is when I start to hear cedar waxwings again.
Waxwings are primarily northern birds, with few breeding in California and those birds essentially restricted to the northernmost section of the state. In Marin, we see them mostly from September until May, when they roam over the county in search of berry-bearing trees, both native and ornamental.
Their odd name refers to a set of unique red appendages they develop on their wings as they mature, concentrations of ingested carotenoids that in other birds are weakly dispersed and spread out rather than distilled into these little bits of vibrant wax. These waxy tips are just one component of their striking overall appearance: a bold black mask slashes across their face, a boldly pointed crest rises from their head and a bold band of yellow cuts across their tail.
Waxwings are stunning to see in a photograph, but often appear quite muted and discreet as we encounter them in the real world. Their overall tone is a rich and creamy tan, and they are most often seen flocking in the canopy of some not particularly proximate tree, silhouetted against the sky.
One pleasure I derive from waxwings is this sense of a secret splendor, a quite astonishing beauty that I know is right above my head, but which the uninitiated miss. I’ve shown their picture in presentations, hearing little gasps and oohs and ahs of appreciation from the audience, followed by comments that many of my listeners have never encountered this bird. I meet them nearly every week, because I am constantly listening for their presence.
Listening — that’s the key to detecting waxwings. As flocking winter birds, waxwings maintain a nearly constant stream of communication, reliably heard whenever a troop of waxwings feeds, perches or passes by in flight. And these calls are distinctive, consisting of high, thin, lisping whistles plaintively repeating from the treetops or somewhere invisibly overhead.
The only caveat to this easy recognition is that the pitch of these calls is extremely high, so some waxwing seekers whose sensitivity to high-frequency sounds has faded may not be able to detect the more faint and distant birds. Listen to these “zree” calls in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID app or on their All About Birds website to familiarize yourself with what you’re listening for.
I write this column from a park where a hundred-strong flock of waxwings is seething in the tree above my head. Seething is the word I mean — they are constantly in motion, like a turbulent sea trying to escape a rocky inlet, with birds swelling up to an outer perch to cling momentarily as they rest a berry free before receding to a more stable branch to finish devouring their find. Birds leap and cling and flutter briefly to new positions, momentarily dropping in the air or landing for brief instants on a nearby building. Some individuals descend into the lower branches, where even unbinoculared I can see the proud and scowling faces of the black-masked wanderers of winter.
And all the while I can hear those constant piercing whistles, like walking into a swarm of bees, if bees were the size of my hand, crested, and adorned with red and yellow. The sound surrounds me like a cloud within this sunny autumn morning. And as strangers walk by unawares, the waxwings swarm in secret.
Something strikes them into motion — and a hundred strange and stunning creatures rise into the sky, swell and contract in swift coordination, and carry off their plaintive whistles, fading once more from my vision.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato and author of “The Private Lives of Public Birds.” You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.