Bohemian Waxwing: Europe’s bird-of-paradise

My winter has been crowned by a visitation of waxwings to Derbyshire that includes a congregation on the Monsal Trail near Bakewell of c360 birds, among the largest flocks ever recorded in the county. I have waited half a century to see even a group involving three figures but the sight and experience of these hundreds is nothing short of wondrous.

They possibly originate in northern Fenno-Scandia where they breed, but they could easily come from further east since waxwings encircle the Earth through the taiga forests of northern Russia and North America, reaching their western European limits in Finland or Sweden beyond the sixty-degree meridian. A striking aspect of waxwing appearances in Britain is that they are triggered by increases in the northern population possibly because of warmer, more productive conditions during their breeding season. The resulting over-abundance of fruit-eaters places pressure on local fruit supplies, which form the whole of the waxwings’ winter diet. For they are truly frugivores deluxe, more exclusively dependent on this food source than any other species. (Remarkably, while nesting, parent waxwings flycatch for insects and especially mosquitoes; so when next someone moans what use are mosquitoes: tell them they give rise to our winter’s most beautiful bird.)

If it is not the continent’s most dazzling songbird, it is in an elite cadre with wallcreeper and golden oriole and perhaps 1-2 others. Just look at the details that make up waxwing aesthetics. The bird’s whole plumage is dense and lax almost like luxuriant fur and then there is that black bandit’s mask, which can give its owner an occasional threatening shrike-like quality, although the way it sweeps up and back from the eye, which is itself framed delicately in white, reminds me of the kind of kohl-line beloved of Egyptian queens.

Then there is a double white stripe through the closed wing. The second, longer, outer ‘white’ line is actually not monochrome, but includes a lovely lemon yellow along the outer edges and tips of several main flight feathers. The secondaries are edged white but also tipped with outer ‘nibs’ of what looks to be red sealing wax (hence the name). Then, for good measure, the tail end is dipped in saffron-coloured ink. Even now I have left out the crowning glories of waxwing beauty: that shocking Madam Pompadour headcrest and those elongated undertail coverts which are the most exquisite shade of chestnut maroon. I’ve discovered that the best way to try to get to grips with all this feather-by-feather complexity is to try to draw or paint it. Trust me; it is … difficult. Here is the whole remarkable garb delineated on three berry-feeding birds.

Another joy of waxwings is their quest for fruit, which entails a miracle of navigation and relies upon the kind of aerial reconaissance of the landscape which our military planners could only dream about. Waxwings are dependent upon the rowan crop in northern latitudes but further south they are obliged to take other fare. At Hassop in Derbyshire it is the super-abundance of late hawthorn berries that has brought such numbers to one place.

By chance I happened to capture this individual above, technically LYW with colour rings on both legs (the title draws on Light [green], Yellow and White descending the left leg). It turns out to have been pre-trapped by a remarkable team including Raymond Duncan and the actual ringers Ally and Kev, who caught the birds in New Elgin, northern Scotland (512 km away) in one intensely successful operation on 13 November 2023. Remarkably, a friend Andy Gregory had captured images at Hassop of another coloured-ringed bird that had come out Ally and Kev’s bag three waxwings before my own LYW.

The two birds, both young males, had reunited in Derbyshire and could have travelled through half of Britain together. However, as Raymond tells me, the species shows little in-flock fidelity and Andy’s bird has now been sighted in Liverpool. Just to give you a sense of what puts the Bohemia in the bird’s official name, the New Elgin birds have now been sighted in the following places “Aberdeen 3/12, Dundee 20/11, Motherwell 28/11 and Ayr 11/12 and in England 2 in Lancashire in Barnoldswick 30/11 and Gainsborough 17/12; others in Carlisle 25/11; Newcastle 6/12; Whitley Bay N.Tyneside 11/12; Ipswich 13/12 and 17/12; 2 in Durham 23/12, 24/12 one of which had moved 145km NNW from Lincolnshire; Bakewell, Derbyshire; Brighouse W.Yorkshire and Langeland in Denmark”. (See the website of this fabulous Grampian Ringing Group here.) Some of their birds are now in Sussex 630 km from Elgin. Many are first-year juveniles and have never migrated before, yet they navigate our landscapes and find suitable food sources often entirely alone and ustilising only their innate resources.  

Waxwings have been visiting the the middle latitudes of Europe and recognised by its citizens since the sixteenth century. The unpredictable nature of these sudden irruptions was treated with high suspicion by our ancestors and the waxwing was judged a bird of ill omen, fortelling imminent disaster. Even now in Holland they are called pest vogel, which roughly translates as ‘pestilence bird’. The appearance of waxwings in Europe in 1913/4 was taken as a sign of the First World War. Retrospectively, of course!

Truly, however, nothing could be further from the facts. Waxwings speak in complex ways of the wonderful interdependence of our world, both in terms of its geography and biology. For the birds not only eat berries and fruit, they also plant fruit-bearing trees. Some individuals have been recorded to consume three times their weight in berries a day and then, of course, sow the seeds of new life once they fertilise the wintering areas with waxwing poop. In keeping with the bird’s delicate aura, even its droppings are said at times to resemble string of pearls.

Trees, produce fruit precisely so that their reproduction and propagation can be completed by birds and no other European species is so devoted to that mutually beneficial exchange than the waxwing. However, another extraordinary avian family, mainly from New Guinea, that expresses this interdependence is the birds-of-paradise. Much of their incredible ecology not to mention their world-famous beauty draws from this mutualism.

Given that many of the waxwing’s favourite foods are produced by members of the family Rosaceae – rowan and sorbus berries, hawthorn and rosehip – the species is, in effect, a rose-gardener. it is fascinating to contemplate that the very word ‘paradise’ has its origins in ancient Persia (Old Persian pairidaeza, modern Farsi firdaus) almost 5000 years ago and was used to describe a tradition of enclosed arbors perfumed with the scent of the cultivated rose. Perhaps it is time to recognise that that this mysterious wanderer from the far north – the Bohemian waxwing – is in more ways than one Europe’s very own bird-of-paradise.