The Bohemian Bird

Dawn was disappointingly gray over Lake Superior. Having been given a rare chance to wake up with a lake view, I’d hoped for something a little more spectacular. But a touch of color warmed the far horizon, and if I looked closely enough, a bit of sea smoke danced across the rippled surface.

Then movement closer up caught my eye. In the bare tree just outside the window, a flock of birds bustled. Their main activities seemed to be stretching up to pluck a mountain ash berry from its stem and then fluttering to another part of the tree in search of the next fruit. Their behavior, plus their dapper crests and rakish black masks, immediately identified them as waxwings.

Cedar waxwings are quite common in the Northwoods year-round. They nest near rivers throughout the northern half of North America, and I often spot them flycatching out over the water as I paddle by. Winter finds them eating berries across this country and into Central America.

Cedar waxwings have the same jaunty crests and rakish black eye masks as Bohemian waxwings, but they also have a yellow belly and white under their tails. Adults at least three years old also have a bright red spot on each of their wings. Photo by Emily Stone.

But cedar waxwings have yellow bellies, white under their tails, and just a dab of red on their wingtips. These birds’ bellies matched the gray of the low clouds, and under their tails was an orange that reflected the fading sunrise. The red on their wingtips was set off by jaunty splashes of white and yellow, with the yellow also banded across the tips of their tails. There was no doubt that these were Bohemian waxwings!

Bohemian waxwings have jaunty crests, rakish black eye masks, orange under their tails, a yellow tip on their tails, and three colors of markings on their wings. They are winter visitors to the Northwoods. Photo by Emily Stone.

Bohemian waxwings are less common visitors to the Northwoods. They breed in northwest Canada and Alaska as well as across northern Scandinavia and Russia, overlapping with their cousins, the Japanese waxwings. In the winter, they spread south into the western U.S., southern Canada, and northern Europe and Asia. In fact, it may have been a Swiss physician who first bestowed upon these widespread birds the name Bohemian. He based their original scientific name on a folk belief that the birds originated from Czech lands also known as Bohemia. Today we know that this region is just a small part of their winter habitat.

Who knew that there are Japanese waxwings? Not me, until researching this article!
Photo by  sunjiao - www.inaturalist.orgphotos398986107, CC BY 4.0.

Eventually, the term Bohemian, through an association with the roving Roma people, also came to mean wanderers, vagabonds, and free-spirited people who pay little attention to society’s conventional norms and expectations. It is this meaning that seems best applied to these unusual birds.

Unlike most songbirds, waxwings are happy to live in close association with their kin throughout the year and don’t bother to defend a breeding territory around their nest. Many of the beautiful and complicated songs we hear birds belting out during the dawns of spring and summer are meant to claim a territory and ward off competitors, but waxwings have no need for this. They don’t have a true song, but use high-pitched calls to communicate with their flockmates.

Bohemian waxwings are particularly mobile. While many other birds can be observed at the same nest site year after year, Bohemians don’t usually return to the same area to breed. Instead, they follow the abundance of fruit in both summer and winter.

Bohemian waxwing eating a berry. Photo by Lisa Hupp USFWS - Public Domain. 

Fruits are full of sugar, but not many other nutrients, so waxwings may eat double their own weight in berries in a single day in order to get what they need. Their short, wide intestines have enzymes to help break down the sugar, their large liver converts the sugar to energy, and they poop frequently to expel the seeds. When eating fruits that have dehydrated over the winter, waxwings must drink water or eat snow to avoid becoming dehydrated themselves.

Bohemian waxwings are known for their ability to find a tree full of berries in the middle of nowhere, descend on it en masse, strip every edible fruit from the twigs, and then disappear to their next meal. That’s exactly what they did as I watched.

This flock of Bohemian waxwings quickly stripped the tree of all fruit. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Waxwings hopped from twig to twig, sizing up each red mountain ash berry before stretching or fluttering up to nab it. Often the bird would mash the berry a bit in their beak before swallowing it whole. During brief pauses in feeding, the birds seemed to clean their beaks on a twig by wiping them from side to side. Some of the flock gleaned more berries off the red-stained snow beneath the tree.

Mountain ash berries provide food for many bird throughout the fall and winter. 

Photo by Emily Stone.

A few members of the flock shifted next door to another mountain ash tree with a few berries left. But that tree was soon stripped of all fruits, too. Eventually I got distracted with my own breakfast, and by the time I looked out again, not a bird remained. Happily the clouds had departed, too, and my day continued on much brighter than it had begun.

Emily’s brand-new third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.