Happy New Year to you all and welcome to another year of the Sunday Edition. I hope you are all as excited about a new year as I am! To start us off this year we are going to learn about the Bohemian Waxwing, a bird that I saw during the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) which took place yesterday here in Yellowknife. I did a post about the CBC a couple of years ago so if you are interested in learning more, you can read about it here: https://wildknifephotography.ca/…/the-christmas…/
I was surprised by the number of birds I discovered yesterday. I was assigned to a new area and found birds in an area I did not expect. It was wonderful to see so many birds gathered around neighbourhood feeders getting the energy they need to stay warm: it was -42ºC with the wind chill yesterday! These waxwings didn’t seem to mind as they jostled back and forth among the branches plucking the frozen berries from this tree chattering and trilling happily with each other. It is so lovely to hear birdsong in the dead of winter.
Waxwings are hearty birds and there are just three species of waxwing in the world: Bohemian, Cedar, and the Japanese Waxwing all of whom are fruit connoisseurs. Bohemian Waxwings have an uncanny ability to find fruit nearly everywhere, almost like they have a GPS tracker for berries. Flocks sometimes turn up in desert areas, find an isolated shrub, devour its fruit in minutes, and move on.
Waxwings will eat almost any fruit available including strawberry, mulberry, raspberry, mountain ash, cranberry, hawthorn, Russian olive, and apple. During the winter waxwings eat dried fruits. The higher sugar content of dried fruit means that waxwings frequently drink water and even eat snow to help with digestion. As winter turns to spring, birds also drink sap dripping from maple and birch trees.
Waxwings have red, waxy tips on some of their wing feathers and yellow tips on the tail. The colour comes from carotenoid pigments found in the fruit waxwings eat. As the birds get older, the waxy tips get bigger. You can see some of the red feather tips in one of the photos.
The oldest recorded Bohemian Waxwing was at least 5 years and 10 months old. Researchers banded the individual in 1968 in Saskatchewan and recovered the same individual in 1973.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed learning about these chubby little birds.