A few months ago I didn’t know what a Cedar Waxwing was. How times have changed! I remember the first shot I got of one of these guys… the light wasn’t great but I could tell it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Check out that Mohawk and bandit mask! I could tell this was a bird with attitude!
If you’re able to see these closer they get even cooler. Even in this little picture, you can tell that it looks like this bird’s tail was dipped in yellow paint. Maybe he landed on the edge of an open paint can and misjudged the paint level or something. I can almost picture God dipping these each in a little jar of paint and then freeing them to fly the world.
This weekend I found a bunch of these interesting birds sitting together in a tree. In this shot, you can see the yellow tip of the tail, but also a very vivid red on its wing. If you look close, you can see a second one hiding behind a leaf to the right of the picture. Yellow, gray, orange/brown, white, distinct mask, and a Mohawk. That’s one cool bird!
The first one I spotted appeared to be alone. Every other time I’ve seen these, they have been in a huge group. I’ll spot one or two and then notice that the entire tree is full of them. They’ll chatter and hop about a little bit, preening and eating. That makes me thing there were a lot more that I didn’t see that first time!
Usually the entire group flies off as soon as I point my camera their way. The ones I found on our family hike on Sunday were a lot more tolerant, though. After I shot a few pictures of them, I let my kids creep in closer. I thought they’d fly off and if I were lucky I might get a picture of one on the wing. My boys just stood at the bottom of the trees staring up, the birds staring back. At some point the birds took off, but they only flew one tree deeper into the woods. That allowed me to get closer and get a few more pictures. It was quite a treat!
Here is a few of them together.
This one was off by itself. It was hiding in a shadow, but I wanted to share this picture because I love the moon in the background here.
Birds and The Bs 