Bohemian Waxwings - Exquisite Winter Visitors

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Bohemian Waxwings – Exquisite Winter Visitors

Written by Bob Sundstrom

This is BirdNote!

A light dusting of snow whitens the hillsides along the Columbia River, a quiet backdrop to scores of apple orchards. Most of the fruit was harvested in autumn, but apples litter the ground, and a few still hang, frozen and thawed again and again.

Suddenly a flock of hundreds of birds rises from the ground beneath the apple trees, swarming in tight formation, wing-tip to wing-tip. [Generic wing sounds] The flock lifts and perches in orderly ranks, in the top of a nearby poplar. [Buzzing/trilling notes of a flock of Bohemian Waxwings]

These are Bohemian Waxwings, occasional visitors during the winter, down from their nesting grounds in the boreal forests of the north. They’re nomads, come in search of fruit to sustain their winter wanderings.

Bohemian Waxwings, larger kin of Cedar Waxwings, are exquisite, with silken-plumage, a jaunty crest, black mask, and wings daubed as if with sealing wax in red, yellow, white, and black. Add to this a tail dipped in yellow, and you have a bird that seems to have sprung from a painter’s palette.

Quickly the flock is off again, [Wing sounds] swirling up the canyon to adorn the winter branches of another orchard. [Buzzing of the Bohemian Waxwings]

See the birds we feature each day and others in the week ahead, when you sign up for our weekly preview email. It’s easy and completely without obligation – at birdnote.org. I’m Mary McCann.

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Call of the Bohemian Waxwing provided by The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by W.W.H. Gunn    
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2015 Tune In to Nature.org      January 2017/2019/2021     Narrator: Mary McCann
ID#011906BOWAKPLU   BOWA-01b