Check out some of the brilliant birds of the Amazon. (Don’t miss the last one!) (via @jerinthejungle)⁣

Bird of the Week: The Cedar Waxwing

Photo by Watts (Flickr)

Found in North and Central America

Hear Their Calls

Cedar Waxwings know how to live well: they gather in groups of hundreds in the fall to socialize and celebrate a bounty of fruit, eating an abundance of sweet berries like cedar, juniper, and winterberry. They can be a noisy gaggle, often making high-pitched calls of trills and whistles, and can be spotted in California and other lower North and Central American areas during the winter months.

These gorgeous birds are known for their delightful coloring, with smooth necks, heads, and backs of sandy browns and grays, a stark black mask, sunny bellies and tail tips, and a red line on each wing. (They’re named for waxy red secretions on some birds’ secondary feathers, the purpose of which is not known.) They are very willing backyard visitors to those who nurture native fruit-producing trees and shrubs.

Fun fact: Cedar Waxwings really like to party. They occasionally get drunk from eating too many fermenting berries!

Photo by Brent Eades (Flickr)

Photo by Ashok Boghani (Flickr)

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Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
in sun, and I am one.

Such merriment and such sobriety—
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk—
was this not always my true style?

Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together—for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.

– “Waxwings” by Robert Francis