Fern Glen Essays
A Moveable Feast...
by Judy Sullivan

Bombycilla cedrorum

On a late mid-summer afternoon in upstate New York, despite the absence of any ornithological interest, your passing attention might be drawn toward a small flock of birds barely concealed in bushes, brambles and thickets. You ears might be attuned to a low-level racket - a rustling, reedy, lisping, hoarse twittering. In fact, the whole commotion seems to indicate some sort of avian moveable feast, with fruit as the main course.

Now curious, you pause and watch from a distance of 20 feet or so, noting their utter disinterest in your bipedal proximity; their industry apparently more important than your possible predatory threat. The sun is slowly sinking in the west, casting stark shadows on yonder foliage. You strain to make a possible identification. In silhouette, the birds seem to be female cardinals, brownish in color and with a jutting crest at the back of the head. However, when one of them nimbly flutters from one slender perch to another, there is a flash of yellow tail feathers and you realize your error. These birds are olive-brown, rather than reddish, and in all of your years you've never seen a whole harem of cardinals. Besides, these particular feathered frolickers are wearing black "Zorro" masks. And so, you've surely ID-ed the cedar waxwing. You may be inclined to linger and observe some curious bird behavior.

Cedar waxwings aren't given to the most flattering of analogies. Indeed, they could be viewed as sort of an avian plague of locusts, albeit an elegant one. They're often known to move in flocks through an area and opportunistically gorge themselves on fruit (juniper, the invasive autumn olive and honeysuckle, and choke cherries, to name a few) to the point of stupefaction, especially if the fruit in question is very ripe and a trifle fermented. Many birdwatchers have witnessed flocks of waxwings in a kind of torpor, perched all in a line on a limb, passing a berry from beak to beak, apparently no one of them able to swallow another bite.

If you're an old bird...er from way back and hailing from the Northeast, you can likely wax nostalgic about the days when all of the Bombycilla had a butter yellow tipped tail, and not the orange tip that many sport today. The red and orange fruit of the invasive exotic honeysuckle shrub that pervades our woods and hedgerows has, in recent years, comprised such a large part of the diet of many of these birds, that the pigment contained in it has altered the coloration of its consumer, in the same way that a sustained and substantial consumption of carrots can give a person's skin an orange cast. (No, this isn't yellow journalism. My husband, for a period of time, appeared as an anthropoid root vegetable.) But, don't worry. The waxy tips of the secondary feathers, from which the bird derives its common name, are still robustly red.

If you can't see these beautiful birds at your place, I encourage you to visit the Fern Glen and join them with your own fruity repast.

Questions, comments, or other feedback to Judy Sullivan.