The object of these essays is to nurture awareness – not just to add some facts to your mental anthologies, but to recalibrate your perspective, to flip a switch that ultimately transforms your whole perception of the world. I often think of this Emersonian declaration:
There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I cannot look without seeing splendor and grace.
– “Fate”
By reflecting on the inexhaustible variety of the world, we steadily lower our threshold for noteworthy, acknowledged splendor until we find it everywhere. Everyday life becomes richer. Dissatisfaction seems ungrateful. Most travel, consumption, and other chasing after novelty simply becomes superfluous: there is already more than I can absorb right here, in this moment. To expand or deepen my experience, the most expedient thing to do is not to hop in a car or pull out my wallet, but to skip those tedious and instrumental preliminaries, step out my doorway, and open my ears and eyes right now.
Few birds encapsulate the revelatory, revolutionary impact of a little knowledge more clearly than the cedar waxwing. They are present in most neighborhoods around Marin, they invariably impress when they are seen up close for the first time, and yet the majority of people live their lives without even knowing of the cedar birds’ existence. The actual “knowledge” needed to find them is exceedingly small and ends up consisting of the usual things involved in recognizing anyone, whether bird or human: what they look like, what their voice sounds like, and where they spend their time.
The disproportion between the low level of waxwing acquaintance despite the high level of waxwing splendor stems from the answers to these questions and how they evade our habitual ways of thinking. Waxwings are inconspicuous at a distance but stunning in close proximity, quiet but audibly unmistakable, geographically hard to pin down with perfect precision but secretly ubiquitous: these paradoxical qualities represent the subtle gap between the ignorant and the aware observer.
But you can cross that gap of knowledge and attunement to a new state where effortless recognition and frequent encounter are your default waxwing experience. Just a little attention, and you can step out from the tribe of oblivious busyness. Then the black-masked soldiers of winter will be a steadily recurrent presence in your life, and when they blast their impossible high horns to sound the charge, you shall be among the few who hear the call.
An unexpected martial beauty
It is a resolute and combative-looking bird.
– Thoreau, The Journal, June 16, 1854
… birds of a ravishing beauty, albeit engaged in a scramble for food as unseemly as that of an American pie-eating contest.
– Dawson, The Birds of California
The waxwing troops strike south in winter. Their demeanor is as warlike as Thoreau suggests, their organization tight and controlled, and their objective clear: locate the berries, leave no survivors, keep moving. The martial parallels can of course be stretched and exaggerated beyond the strict bounds of accuracy. But look at this bird! For a fruit-eating songbird of modest proportions, you will be hard pressed to find a countenance of more determinedly combative expression.
Now, bird “expressions” may be 95% the product of human imagination, but what, after all, is a soldier’s uniform? Part of a uniform’s point is to give a warlike appearance where the reality may not exist. I wouldn’t put money on a waxwing in a gladiatorial combat with a shrike or a scrub-jay. Really, their only regularly vanquished foes are berries. But they look tough.
That impression to our eyes stems largely from the head and face. The dominant feature of the waxwing demeanor is undoubtedly that bold black band across the eyes, like the shadowed eye-slit of a helmeted head encased for combat. A thin white line continues the division of the downcurved beak, extending the mouth into a permanent frown of displeasure. The crest perks up in angular defiance.
It was a handsome face, marred only by a scar that pulled down Sharpe’s left eye to give him a mocking, knowing expression… He looked, Trumper-Jones thought, the very image of a man who had taken the first French Eagle captured by the British, who had stormed the breach at Badajoz, and charged with the Germans at Garcia Hernandez.
– Description of a hard-man hero, Sharpe’s Honor, Bernard Cornwell
In strict objectivity, black face feathers are about as indicative of character as an unsettling scar. Maybe that guy is really a very soft and mild-mannered person and not a tough, up-from-the-ranks rifleman single-handedly responsible for Napoleon’s defeat via hundreds of acts of personally-inflicted violence with a heavy cavalry sword. You should exercise some caution when judging real people you meet by their scar placement and feather color and so on. But a little bit of interpretative license makes the world of stories more interesting. And I like to have my neighborhood trees filled with exciting characters of suitably dramatic appearance.
The martial metaphors feel particularly apropos because their applicability extends beyond an individual waxwing’s appearance. Waxwings are rarely individuals; they are troops, members of a uniformed coalition. That uniform is appropriately neat and tidy, with splashes of bright color serving as small but prominent epaulets and insignia: red wax on the wings, yellow paint on the tail (soldiers love their ribbons). Even in their basic movements, carefully synchronized field maneuvers of coordinated flight, waxwings submerge their individuality beneath their identity as members of this army. Signals and responses, strict interdependence – these are as good as any field marks for recognizing the presence of the waxwing forces.
The thing about these detailed descriptions of appearance, however, is that they presuppose a certain proximity: when you see a good photo or get a real close-up view with binoculars, those little details stand out as striking traits of an unusually handsome bird. But at a distance, without magnifying aids, the details fade into a more uniform brown: there is no overall bright red, blue, or yellow to shout for attention. “Waxwing” was not the foremost of their traditional names, because those little waxy combs are usually invisible to the unaided eye at typical distances: instead they were either named for the trees they frequented (cedar-birds, cherry-birds) or for their actual visual impression of plainness of plumage (Quaker birds).
But see the details and everything changes. See the details and they are transformed. At a distance, the crest is inconspicuous, the Zorro mask and stern demeanor invisible. At a distance, the namesake patches of waxy red on the wings go undetected (formed by sequestering carotenoids from their diet in a concentrated mass, young birds consequently lack the waxy comb, which grows in size over the first years of life). Even the larger and more consistent splash of color, the yellow- or orange-dipped tip of the tail, is easily overlooked by the unbinoculared observer at any considerable distance.
This is a basic point, applicable to many birds, but this one more than most: proximity is vital for establishing real familiarity, but is often hard to achieve. It’s found more easily with some birds than with others – chickadees and hummingbirds and other fearless and ubiquitous yard birds are the best candidates – while other species are more cautious and stand-offish, like hawks or waxwings. You won’t generally approach such birds within five feet, to a comfortable and amicable speaking distance. But in such cases, we can employ those partial facsimiles of intimate approach: optical enhancement through binoculars or cameras. Such tools cut the effective distance of our most crucial sense of sight by a factor of eight or more: an achievable 50 foot proximity becomes that more intimate five feet, as far as our eyes are concerned.
For those who are not accustomed to carrying binoculars or a camera, and perhaps even more for those who are, it is worth underlining a vital secondary point: you do not always need to use these tools. Use them to see waxwings just once, to see them well, and you will find them hard to unsee, hard to forget.
As with getting to know any person, a close proximity is necessary to establish relations. But once you know them, once their image and voice is embedded in your memory, this coherent portrait will flash into your mind at the first moment of every subsequent approach.
Binoculars and cameras will make your eyes feel closer, will teach you the fine lines of the waxwing’s face. Looking through them for the first time is a revelation. But cameras give their greatest gift when your friend is recorded not in dots of light on a screen, but in the pages of your memory. Binoculars give their greatest gift when you see that face with your unaided eye, no matter what the distance.
Do you hear the shrill soldiers?
Out of every hundred waxwings I encounter, the number that I first detect by sight is roughly zero. 80 I hear and can then locate visually; 20 I only ever hear as they pass overhead somewhere, quickly disappearing into the distance. When people tell me they never see waxwings, the biggest difficulty therefore seems to be that they don’t hear waxwings.
And yet they are talkative birds, almost always flocking, constantly calling to each other with high lisping whistles. They are not loud notes, they are not singers. But once you tune into their unmistakable frequency, the waxwings in your life will at least triple.
There is, however, a trick and disclaimer to the ease of learning this distinctive voice: it is very high-pitched and there are some who cannot hear it, at least not when it is quiet and distant. It’s normal for humans to gradually lose their high-frequency hearing: the decline might begin somewhere around age 30. If you are 60, you will have almost certainly had some decline in your natural ability to communicate with waxwings, and if you are unfortunate you may now miss out on 90% of their messages. This is a physical constraint of humankind.
Indeed, so high-pitched is this extraordinary note, that many people, and they trained bird-men, cannot hear it at all, even when the Waxwings are squeaking all about them.
– Dawson
Hearing waxwings is therefore somewhat like getting into Narnia, meeting Totoro in the forest, having a shape-shifting daemon, or other such privileges of youth. The good news is that the window for waxwing confidence is significantly longer in duration than the prepubescent requirement that children’s writers usually seem to fixate on. Most 40-year-olds can still hear waxwings well and even if you’re 80 you may well be able to apply the aids of knowledge and concentration to find a flock, carefully approach, listen with intention, and find the voices have not yet vanished.
“Fairytales can come true… if you’re young at heart,” sang Ol’ Blue Eyes. I think I’m not alone in seeing these bird and thinking they would be fitting actors in a fairytale. Outer youth might make it easier to find them, but it is the inner youth that magnifies their importance and elevates their stature, that lends the fascination and freshness and instinctive refusal to accept the world as a boring one of stale, quotidian banality that is the biggest key to discovering their presence.
Sometimes the outer youth of sharp hearing and the inner youth of unjaded enthusiasm go together, but sometimes they diverge. If you have the first, and can pluck invisible waxwings out of the sky, congratulations. But if you have the second, if you find your eyes open wide and the corners of your mouth turn up with delight when you find yourself face to face with a tree of these masked marauders, seething with whistles, then you are luckier still.
It’s hard to be narrow of mind, you can laugh when your dreams fall apart, and it’s much better than riches, the song says of this more important youth. What else indicates this happy state? Not that you can hear waxwings like a ten year-old, but that you can see them with equally untired eyes.
When I turned 30 a few months ago, I feared I was about to enter the long downward slide of audible alienation from waxwings and creepers and golden-crowned kinglets, that the high, high voices would increasingly disdain to confide in me. That has not yet come to pass. But now I think that as long as I continue to confide in them, as long as I encounter waxwings with that same undiminished glee, then I shall never feel old.
Patience is Better than a Map
If you would study the birds now, go to where their food is… I came to a small black cherry full of fruit, and then, for the first time for a long while, I see and hear cherry-birds – their shrill and fine seringo.
– Thoreau
People often ask me where to go to see waxwings. In some ways, this can be tough to answer with a high degree of both precision and reliability, since Bay Area waxwings are footloose nomads. The overall pattern is that they come south in winter, appearing from perhaps October into May. But some years there are many and some years there are few. Some months there are many and some months there are few – their numbers fluctuate as the extent of their southward migration varies with food abundance. Within a given area, the abundance of a particular berry will also fluctuate from year to year, meaning you often will not find them in the same tree this November that you found them in last November.
(An aside: as a lover of bird sounds and old words, you might expect me to explain Thoreau’s word “seringo.” After careful study of his journals and the Oxford English Dictionary, my conclusion is that he made it up an appropriate representation of the sound on a purely sonic level, and then proceeded to employ it as the most natural word in the world for the next 15 years of journal writing. I have yet to unilaterally invent any bird sound words. I have been unnecessarily reticent, timidly conservative, and insufficiently extravagant. I’ll have to see what I can do about that.)
On the other hand, we’ve planted a great deal of trees that they find attractive and so waxwings are often nearer than we imagine: they are present in most suburban neighborhoods. If you grow weary of looking up from the end of your driveway with disappointed eyes, you just need to remember the Bombycilline Catechism:
Where can I find waxwings?
You can find them here.
When will I find them?
What’s your hurry?
You need a little patience, but the most practical answer to “where to go” usually remains “outside your door,” if you are in any kind of neighborhood with ornamental trees and shrubs. Hollies and pyracanthas, privets and camphors, pepper trees and who knows what else. Around here, one of the most popular waxwing trees is the Chinese pistache, an elegant ornamental with pinnately compound leaves that turn a brilliant flame-red in fall, then drop, leaving the male trees denuded and the female trees laden with clusters of red-stemmed berries. You can also find them in wild areas, looking at the berries of madrones, toyons, and mistletoes. But I encounter most of my life’s waxwings by simply riding my bike to work through the suburban streets and listening.
It’s a good habit in any case, the neighborhood beat. It takes no time or gas to reach the destination, you often see a greater abundance of birds than in wild areas due to the great variety of plants we’ve put in place, and if the wildlife gets slow you can always reflect on human nature as reflected in your neighbors’ choices of vehicles, house color, yard ornamentation, and the like. The world is an entertaining place and both birds and people provide plentiful objects for our eyeballs.
If your neighborhood is superlatively boring or your judgment muscles are already over-exercised, you can practice walking meditation, in which you focus your mind intentionally upon this simple action, reserving just a little background corner for your subconscious waxwing radar.
Every step is a revolution against busyness. Each mindful step says: “I don’t want to run anymore. I want to stop. I want to live my life. I don’t want to miss the wonders of life.” … You may enjoy arriving and feeling at home for three, four, five, or ten minutes, as long as you like. One hour of practice already begins the revolution.
– “Each Step is an Act of Resistance,” How to Walk, Thich Nhat Hanh
Mind-clearing tranquility will wash away the chatter, screens, consumed entertainments, work obligations, and everyday human troubles while periodically refreshing you with the sounds of waxwings, robins, and golden-crowned sparrows. Look for berries. Waxwings will probably eat them sooner or later. You might not see them on-demand, this instant. And that’s good: they are wild, roaming creatures, not a streaming video service.
Not seeing waxwings today is good for you too. The single most important skill for seeing more birds, more closely, is the ability to wait patiently and receptively. The tyrannous expectation of on-demand gratification will rob you of that vital patience, distort your understanding of natural reality, and ineluctably drain your life of birds. The cure is to go for a walk.
* * *
Waxwings are the best example of the transformative impact of a little knowledge.
- From typical distances, they are anonymous brown birds. But get a pair of binos and their appearance is transformed into the most martial and chieftain-like of birds.
- Tune in to an unmistakable sound and hundreds of previously invisible creatures suddenly fill the suburbs.
- Learn where and when to expect them and waxwings will no longer be a rare and chance surprise, but a regular occurrence in the long run of enlightened patience.
This essay could be roughly reduced to those three points in terms of the actual volume of facts and information conveyed – it really is a very little knowledge needed. As Aldo Leopold says, Babbitt need not take his Ph.D. in ecology to see his country. In fact, I almost hesitate to use the word “knowledge,” given the simple, natural, embeddedness of waxwings in my life: I don’t speak of the “knowledge” needed to enjoy blue skies, a melody, or a hot cup of tea.
I don’t particularly advocate for textbook natural history and the memorization of bird facts. I advocate for seeing, listening, and walking. If doing things well requires practice, then living well calls for some attention to these most essential activities.
Are the cedarbirds absent from your life? Walk out your doorway, walk down the street. Keep your eyes open, listen to every sound. You might not see them today, you might not see them tomorrow. But every day you will see something new. Every day new instruments will be added to the orchestra of crescent spring.
People may wonder why you smile at a sky of seeming silence. For when the shrill soldiers call, you alone shall hear them.
Header photo by Jacob McGinnis
Thanks Jack … once again your writing leaves me breathless and drawn into reverie …
On a more mundane note … how can I entice them to come to my feeders?
– Donna
Thanks Donna! Unfortunately, you pretty much can’t. In a few really cold places, they have been known to sometimes take raisins or human-provided berries, but around here they stick to fruit on the tree, plus some insects as we move into spring. Your best bet is berry-bearing trees and shrubs like the ones I mentioned in the essay.
Hi Jack, what you recounted here about coming upon Cedar Waxwings in the neighborhood is exactly what happened to me. I was recovering from back surgery, and went for a short walk down the block. All of a sudden I came upon a tree full of a flock of chirping birds. I wasn’t able to see what they were so I went home and got my binoculars. When I came back, I was astonished and over-joyed! I grew up in this county and never knew we had waxwings here! They were so beautiful! This special day was what started my journey of bird-watching. Last year I had a bird-watching party at my house and we viewed birds in my backyard from the windows. I had a list of over 20 species that regularly visit my feeders. And sure enough, a lot of birds on the list showed up that day! Thank you for spreading your knowledge. I greatly appreciate it!
A remarkable essay on a most handsome bird; loved your aside about “seringo” – many thanks again, Jack!
This is a nice essay on one of my favorite birds. I’ve never seen them as martial, mostly because I’ve focused on their endearing habit of passing a berry from bird-to-bird, which seems sweet, rather than fierce. Waxwings are indeed abundant this year! I saw a flock this morning in my neighborhood in Santa Venetia, and have been hearing/seeing them every few days for the past month or so.