Cedar Waxwing Print - On Berry Branch

The waxwing leans toward the berry. Crest swept back, the black mask drawn neat across the eye, the tail showing that clean yellow band at its tip. The branch is heavy with fruit. This is the plate of the bird in its element - Bombycilla cedrorum doing the one thing its whole life is organised around.

The Cedar Waxwing is one of the few North American songbirds capable of surviving almost entirely on fruit. In winter, berries are the near-total diet. The flocks move nomadically, stripping one fruiting tree and moving on to the next, following a food source that is unpredictable in space and time. A tree heavy with crabapples in October is bare within a week. The birds are somewhere else in November, or may still be there - it depends entirely on what the shrubs are doing. The species does not defend territory. There is nothing to defend when the resource keeps moving.

The waxy red droplets at the tips of the secondary feathers are more numerous in older birds, and appear to signal age and condition to prospective mates. The bird with the fullest red wingtips has survived longer. In the Audubon-style palette of warm browns, soft grey and deep berry tones, those red tips are the small detail the plate is built around.

The Audubon tradition found the waxwing worth close study in the 1820s. It still is.