Cedar Waxwing in the Pin Cherry Tree

Earlier today, I saw a bird called a black and white warbler (click here for a photo of the black and white warbler I took at a location a few miles away from my yard or here for an ID photo from the Crossley ID Guide). the appearance is distinctive and there was no doubt about what it was, but I did not have my camera. It's a bird that I don't often see in my yard, so I wanted to record it for this blog. I went in to get my camera, but when I came back out, no luck. It was gone into the woods. I won't count it as living in my yard until I can get a photo to share with you.

However, since I had the camera, I walked over to an area where I heard some birds singing to see if I could spot something else. The area where I was looking has several mid-sized pin cherry trees. This was a particularly bad year for pin cherries, in my yard at least. They flowered up beautifully, but very, very few of the flowers bore fruit. I wonder if there was a severe shortage of pollinators this year. The trees have, I would estimate about five percent of the amount of fruit they have had in prior years.

Pin cherries are a favorite of many birds, including the one shown in the photo below, the cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum). I've been writing a regular column about Bird Watching for Examiner.com, so I tend to notice the birds that live in my yard and their habits. I have had cedar waxwings in the pin cherries in prior years, but I was worried that the lack of fruit this year might keep them away. Thankfully, this one, at least, is here.

Cedar waxwing with pin cherries
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011, all rights reserved

Cedar waxwings tend to nest later in the year than many other birds. This is probably due to their heavy reliance on dietary fruit that doesn't ripen until July or later in New England. The picture shows some pin cherries in the top right. You can see that they are not quite ripe as they will be a uniform dark red when ripe.
Pin cherries are quite flavorful and sour. They can be eaten by people, but they are very small and contain a large pit, that makes them more work than they are generally worth. One year, when they are plentiful, I'm planning to gather a batch for fermenting and see if they'll make a decent wine.

In the winter, like American Robins, waxwings tend to flock together and will mob berry bushes and fruit trees en masse to feed. In the breeding season, however, they split up into nesting pairs. They do migrate north into central Canada in the summer and south to Florida, Cuba, and Mexico in the winter, but the territory is so broad  that there are cedar waxwings in the northern half of the United States all year round, though not necessarily the same ones.

The easiest trait to pick out on this bird is the crest. I may stand up erect or be swept back giving the cedar waxwing a distinctive profile either way. The facial coloring is also another clear species indicator. Black, mask-like coloring over the eyes is quite easy to spot. The cedar waxwing will have a white border around the mask top and bottom. The Bohemian waxwing, however, has the white border only on the underside of the mask.

The cedar waxwing in the picture here actually has a variant coloring. The band of color at the tip of the tail feathers is usually yellow in the cedar waxwing, but occasionally it will be orange as seen in this particular bird. So for today, July 8, 2011, what lives in my yard? The cedar waxwing does!