I have been editing movies for the last couple of weeks while avoiding the crowds in Yellowstone. The furthest I’ve gone in the last 2 weeks is to the post office, grocery store and exercise classes in Gardiner. Yesterday I stopped at the post office and noticed the mountain ash in front of the Catholic church next door was loaded with fruit and cedar waxwings. I love those birds so I went home and got my husband and our cameras. We spent several hours filming and photographing the cedar waxwings, their newly fledged babies and a couple of robins. It seems like where ever I find cedar waxwings I find robins. Whether it is on our holly trees in Texas or the mountain ash and other fruit trees in Montana, I find both species.
Cedar waxwings get their name from the fact that they love to eat cedar cones, which look like berries, and their wings have “drips” of red on the ends which look like wax.
It was funny watching them eat the fruit. The first thing they would do is grab a berry and turn their head like they were unscrewing it. Sometimes it came loose, sometimes they had to “loosen” it some more. The young ones, more often than not, usually dropped their’s in the process but then would occasionally go to the ground and pick up fruit. The berries were pretty big for their beaks and many birds threw the fruit up in the air and then caught and swallowed it all in one motion.
Birds store food in a crop, an enlarged area of the esophogus, and we could see some of them had very large crops. One even had a bulge where a berry showed through its thin skin.
Several people stopped and asked us what we were photographing and were impressed at how pretty the waxwings are. One lady stopped and said she was thrilled we were photographing something besides bears, not that bears are normally walking down the streets of Gardiner this time of year.
Judy, these are gorgeous photos and your information was fascinating! Thank you for sharing!
Oh man! I was only a phone call away. LOL Have never seen the babies before. Great shots and sounds like a good break.
That is funny you should say that Barbara because I was thinking the same. I don’t know the answer but I do know some of them had very full crops and they were still eating. That one does look painful but you wouldn’t have thought that if you had been watching the bird.
Sorry Deby. I didn’t think to call you because I figured you would be in the Lamar. We didn’t start shooting them until about 5:00 pm. We were lucky. Verne went and looked yesterday and there were absolutely no berries left. Those guys were fast. The babies out numbered the adults quite a bit. It was fun to watch them trying to figure out how to pull the berries off. The adults did a quick twist motion and had them off, but the babies were either coming up empty or dropping them on the ground.
P.S. Deby keep a watch out on the juniper trees along the river below your house. Cedar waxwings love their cones (they look like berries but they are strangely cones) when they get ripe.
Judy, wonderful photos. I wonder how many berries they can store in their crop. The one photos looks painful with the berry visible through it’s skin.