Zackiedawg
Well-known member
For me, a first-time sighting, as I've never managed to run into these guys before. I've actually hit a few spots the past month hoping to find them, btu they seemed to always be there in the morning and I didn't get there in time. I was starting to think I'd never see them.
So this Sunday, I was hanging out in my driveway chatting with a friend, had my NEX camera with me as I had been showing some shots...and I see small silhouettes of birds filling a neighbor's tree about 150 feet away. Too small for blue jays, too big for swallows. Just for the oddball chance I could ID them later, I snapped a single photo with a 210mm lens. I had essentially forgotten about it until yesterday, when I loaded the shots off the camera, and saw the one silhouette of a tree with what looked like lots of fruit on all the branches. Oh yeah, the unidentified birds!
So I zoomed way in, and they seemed to all have a weird crest coming off the backs of their heads, sort of like cardinals...but they didn't look like cardinal silhouettes. So I brightened the shot up significantly to see what was in the silhouettes, and there were the black banding around the eyes and what appeared to be yellow bellies. Sure enough, cedar waxwings! 25-35 of them, all filling a single tree. I wish I had known what they were when I took the shot, because they were less than 200 feet away - I could have walked right over and gotten closeups. Now I'm hoping they might return to that tree or a nearby one one of these late afternoons. This was at around 4pm - I'm not home until 6pm on weekdays, so now it's just waiting until the weekend.
So this Sunday, I was hanging out in my driveway chatting with a friend, had my NEX camera with me as I had been showing some shots...and I see small silhouettes of birds filling a neighbor's tree about 150 feet away. Too small for blue jays, too big for swallows. Just for the oddball chance I could ID them later, I snapped a single photo with a 210mm lens. I had essentially forgotten about it until yesterday, when I loaded the shots off the camera, and saw the one silhouette of a tree with what looked like lots of fruit on all the branches. Oh yeah, the unidentified birds!
So I zoomed way in, and they seemed to all have a weird crest coming off the backs of their heads, sort of like cardinals...but they didn't look like cardinal silhouettes. So I brightened the shot up significantly to see what was in the silhouettes, and there were the black banding around the eyes and what appeared to be yellow bellies. Sure enough, cedar waxwings! 25-35 of them, all filling a single tree. I wish I had known what they were when I took the shot, because they were less than 200 feet away - I could have walked right over and gotten closeups. Now I'm hoping they might return to that tree or a nearby one one of these late afternoons. This was at around 4pm - I'm not home until 6pm on weekdays, so now it's just waiting until the weekend.
