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Cedar Waxwing — printable fact sheet
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Cedar Waxwing
Bombycilla cedrorum
The red "wax" on a cedar waxwing's wing is real: droplets of a hardened, pigmented secretion at the tips of the secondary feathers, coloured by astaxanthin. Their number increases with age, and waxwings mate assortatively by wax — birds with many tips pair with each other, which…
Did you know?
- Cedar Waxwings can pass berries to each other in a row, forming a 'food chain' before one bird finally eats the fruit.
- Waxwings pass food along a line: a row of birds on a branch will hand a berry or a petal beak to beak down the row and back again, a courtship and social behaviour with no obvious nutritional point. They have almost no song at all, communicating with high, thin, sibilant whistles that many people cannot hear well. Flocks are nomadic and follow fruit, so a tree loaded with berries can go from empty to holding a hundred waxwings in an afternoon.
What I learned
Draw the cedar waxwing
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