Cedar Waxwing

We were shocked the other day by a flock of birds in our back yard . We had never seen them before- Look closely and see all of them in the tree, there must have been twenty. They just flitted about and looked so happy bouncing from branch to branch. We immediately grabbed our camera to take pictures and then just watched them to see what they did before they took flight like a collective cloud of yellow and green.


Later, we looked through our copy of Peterson's Field guide and found our bird- it is a Cedar Waxwing They are Winter visitors from up north. We discovered that they are sometimes called Cherry birds since they like to eat cherries and other types of berries as well. Our Burgess Bird Book describes them as birds who are valuable to an apple orchard because they feast on worms that would otherwise consume the apples.
Look at the tuft on it's head- so much like a cardinal. They have a yellow breast and olive feathers as a coat. The tip of it's short tail is trimmed in a yellow and red stripe and it's eye is trimmed in a velvet black- beautiful.