"Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Others? Which Of These Things Isn't The Same?" Waxwings, Crossbills & Siskins

Bohemian waxwings gorging on crab apples

Cedar and Bohemian waxwings. Can you pick out which are which?

The Cedar waxwings in this photo are numbered so you can find them amongst the Bohemian waxwings. Cedars are slightly smaller. If you look under their tails, they are white. Bohemians have reddish coverts and less white around the face than Cedars.

In this collage, there are 105 birds.  Nine of them are Cedar waxwings. Double click on the collage to make it bigger, then see if you can pick out the nine birds that are different. The photo is repeated with numbers by the Cedar waxwings.

The photo on the right is of a Cedar waxwing. The image clearly shows the 'wax' tips of the primary feathers.

White-winged crossbills bickering with a Pine siskin over feeder rights, or maybe they are going to get it on!

     When I was a kid, I loved Highlights Magazine. The 'picture in a picture' puzzles fascinated me. I felt like they were made especially for me to figure out. How fast could I find a key hidden amongst a tree full of toucans or a shoe in the shapes of a leopard's spots? First published in 1946, the magazine is still going strong today. I read my first Highlights Magazine in Boston in 1964.
      I was a sickly child, so spent a lot of time in waiting rooms of doctors' offices. The year that I was nine, I was hospitalized several times with protracted fevers that medicine could neither remedy nor explain. For months, my temperature sky-rocketed then plummeted over and over again inexplicably. By the time I learned "Fever Of Unknown Origin," I had lost enough time from school that my academic progress was cause for concern.
     Monstrous ear aches kept me awake, moaning and rocking myself back and forth, alone in a quiet house where everyone else was sleeping. After a while, I quit crying because it just made my head hurt more. I stared into space waiting for the sun to come up, for sleep, for whatever until it was gone. Between bouts, I was weak and tired. My exhausted parents were frightened, the doctors worried. When the earaches stopped, the fevers continued.
     The first time I was hospitalized was in the middle of the night. I was in an isolation ward with babies in steel cribs with cages over the tops so they couldn't get out. Some of the babies could stand up. They'd hold onto the bars and jounce up and down, screaming until they were too exhausted to keep it up. They'd collapse in a heap of soggy diapers and sleep for a while, only to start up again the second they woke. No one came.
   The doctors wanted my blood when the fevers were in full swing. In the middle of the night, they'd wake me up to draw my blood. Dr. Lacey wore a white coat and had warm hands. "Count backwards from one hundred, Robin. Can you do that for me? Just start counting," he'd say. I watched the blood from the needle in my arm meander along a little tube into a vial, then another vile, and then a third. "ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six...." I whispered under my breath. This would go on for a week, then I'd go home. Before I was strong enough to go back to school, the fevers would start again, and back to the hospital I would go. I was always the same, though each time, the screaming babies were different.
     Eventually, I was sent to Peter Brent Brigham Hospital in Boston for two weeks. My family couldn't stay with me, so I was there alone. Tests were done, things that hurt and things a little girl shouldn't have to know about. I knew not to complain, not to cry, to be brave. I walked the halls of the old hospital staring up at the tallest ceilings I had ever seen. An occupational therapist was called to stave off my boredom. She taught me to hammer sheet copper. I hammered three daffodils nodding in the sun.
    For no good reason, the fevers stopped and stopped for good. In the mean time, I had read loads of Highlights Magazines. I particularly liked the puzzles where the reader had to pick out the one thing in the picture that was different from all the rest. I  became lightening fast at it, a skill that would serve me well as a birder in later years. I learned about big cats in Africa, penguins at the Arctic circle, Right whales in the sea,  and more. Those were the formative days of my eventual obsession with the natural world.
     All sentient creatures have the ability to discriminate. Our survival depends on being able to tell what plants are food or poison, if something is too hot to handle or a crevice too wide to jump. We get it right enough that we don't walk off cliffs or eat deadly mushrooms too often. Animals also use these skills for finding mates. In the case of waxwings, the red, 'wax' tips on the primary feathers are believed to signal the age of a bird. Younger birds that haven't had as much experience mating, nest building, laying eggs and rearing young have fewer wax tips than older, more street smart birds. Waxwings side hop when courting, suggesting that it's all the better to see the wax tips with. This seems simple enough, but mate picking is knotty business.
    We humans have more gaps in our understanding about what makes birds choose one another than we have solid science. To our eyes, the waxwings in the group photos above look so much alike, that unless we are looking for a difference, they all look the same. Though I have searched extensively, I have not found one single reference to reports of hybridization of Bohemian and Cedar waxwings. Logically, we would say that the birds can pick out subtle differences. But this is where it gets tricky: in spite of their powers of discrimination, there are birds that crossbreed readily. Mallards and American black ducks, Common and Barrow's goldeneyes,  and mergansers are some that do. It's not common, but it's not rare, either. In the 1980's there was a chick documented that was progeny of a Pine siskin and a Red crossbill, two birds of different species which look distinctly different by anyone's standards. The DNA of the chick was traced by ornithologists verifying its parentage [1]. Who'd a thunk it? This is one more reason to practice the adage of birders to "look at every bird." You might be the first to see the picture in the picture, the one that's not like the others. Keep reading your Highlights Magazines cover to cover.
    
 1. Tudge, C.  "Keeping Track: The Absolute Need To Classify," The Bird (2008), New York: Crown Publishers (2008), p77

Birds and Butterflies from Paraguay to Phippsburg

 Thirty years ago, I was in the Peace Corps. I spent three years in Paraguay. I was young and stupid then (now I'm moderately old and still stupid it seems), and I didn't know much about birds. Oh, I knew more about birds than most of the people I knew, but not what I know now. Today, I consider myself an actual Birder in the Audubon capital "B" sense of the word. I am a novice, but I'm dedicated. I spend way too much time and money in order to see birds, lure birds, count birds, photograph birds, anything to do with birds. I see lots of amazing, beautiful, and once in a while rare birds. Sometimes I get decent photographs of them, too. But mostly, I have a great time and it gives me repeated excuses for not doing the laundry or dishes or other mundane activities. I'm not employed so other than eating, sleeping and speaking to my husband once in a while, I can bird all I want to. Some would say I'm obsessed. Perhaps. I like to think that all this is keeping my mind sharp. I'm old enough that some of my pals are taking up crossword puzzles to stave off memory loss. That seems so dull compared to frantically thumbing through a Sibley's Guide to Birds trying to decide what some unfamiliar bird actually is before the memory of its identifying details fade away. Which brings me to another of my compulsions (I have numerous of them some of which conveniently overlap), photography. I'll discuss this particular neurosis later, but for now let's say photography helps me be a better birder because I can capture a bird in a photograph for later identification, and I actually see things about the birds in photographs that my withered naked eyes do not. I tell myself that this also keeps my mind sharp and that hefting my obscenely large telephoto zoom lens is stalling osteoporosis (osteopenia my physician says).
But, back to Paraguay. People often ask me if I want to go back there. No. The emphatic answer is no. I don't miss a thing about it. I was not happy. In fact, I was terribly depressed. I can't blame Paraguay or the Peace Corp for that; I was depressed before I got there. Paraguay and the Peace Corp just made my pre-existing condition worse. I never felt as if I was very productive while I was there and I wish I had more appreciation of everything I had seen. In short, I wish I had been a better birder, or even a birder at all! Oh, there were fun times, amazing times, and things I'll always remember (some of which I'll probably never share with anybody). I had a horse to get around places. Every day I rode the horse five miles from the grungy little village I lived in to the colony where I worked. I often saw Macaws in the trees and great flocks of parakeets and parrots. The waves of blue, green and splashes of red remain vivid in my mind. I can hear them squawking and chattering in the trees. I just wish I had more detailed knowledge, like specifically what species of Macaws , what species of parakeets and so on.

To get to the colony, the horse and I had to ford a small river. There was a strip of sand on the edge of the river where masses of butterflies collected to sip salt from the sand (so I was told). Most of the butterflies were soft, sulfur-yellow and there were hundreds and hundreds of them. For some reason they sat on the sand all headed in the same direction. They opened and closed their wings slowly and all at once like a practiced dance routine. I always stopped at the edge of the sand to watch them and to summon the starch to walk through them with the horse. Dozens of them were inevitably crushed under the horse's hooves no matter how slowly I tried to make the horse walk. The butterflies would whorl up into the air in a great cloud, scattering, then landing back on the sand, rising again, landing on the ears of the horse, on my hair, on my arms, on the saddle. Sometimes they would light on my face and lips and eyelids. It was a uniquely tactile event. I got goose bumps at their touch. There were so many of them that I almost felt like I might suck one into my lungs when I breathed. I hated to have to walk into them, disturb them, crush them. But, I also loved that feeling of being enveloped in the cloud of delicate yellow life. For me, nothing has come close to that same experience. Until recently.
For the past two weeks, the last weeks of January, the birds here have been abundant at my bird feeders. I've hardly been able to keep up with keeping them filled with seed. There is a flock of 10 White-winged Crossbills (which I had never seen before this winter), 40-50 Pine Siskins, American Goldfinches, Black-capped Chickadees, Rose-breasted Nuthatches, American Robins, assorted Sparrows, Dark Eyed Juncos, and more. When I go out to fill the feeders the Crossbills stay put. They keep eating until I am close enough to actually put my hand on the feeder. The Siskins whorl up into the air, settle on the feeder lid, on tree branches all around me, on the top rail of the deck, everywhere! They are tiny birds, stripey with patches of yellow on their wings and tails. They are very crabby and aggressive with other birds, some three times their size. When they take flight from the feeders on my approach though, I think fondly of Paraguay.