Waxwing Irruption
I last saw waxwings locally back in 2019 when three birds spent a few days on the edge of a busy road stripping the berries on a small tree.
This winter has been a bumper year for them, all over the country and they eventually worked their way south to my neck of the woods. I would have been happy just seeing one or two but they came down in unprecedented numbers. Between 20 and 50 were present on the edge of an industrial estate which attracted quite a crowd. Once the birds had got used to the traffic and people passing, they were quite happy coming down from their lookout tree onto the rowan below, to strip it of its berries.
With so many birds feeding at once it was a bit overwhelming from a photography point of view, trying to figure out which bird to photograph next. It didn’t take me long to fill up a 16gb memory card and the best part of a second one. Judging by the constant shutter clicks during each of the waxwings feeding visits, I dare say I wasn’t the only one.
Given the frantic feeding that goes on when so many birds are on the same tree, it’s difficult to photograph them with a clear background. You almost always end up with branches obscuring parts of the bird or cluttering up the background. This feeding sequence, above, was about as close as I could get to a clean background, with enough distance between the bird and the tree to offer a bit of subject isolation. I was happy to capture the berry toss though!
After photographing these birds at the one spot it wasn’t long before more and more of them were being seen around the area, including 10 just a mile or so up the road from where I live. I definitely chose the best day to go and photograph them as it was pretty much the only time the sun came out whilst they were there.
In amongst the group was this ringed bird. I reported it and have since found out the individual is known as ‘Bob’ and is a juvenile male that was caught/ringed with 26 other birds at Claremont Gardens, Aberdeen on the 22/11/2023. It is the furthest south one of the birds from this winter's ringing has been seen. Two other individuals from the same catch have been resighted, one still in Scotland by the Kincardine Bridge near Falkirk on the 14th of December and the other in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, on the same day. Raymond said that ‘Bob’ is the second most photographed colour ringed bird this winter so far, second only to an individual called ‘Woo’ in Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent.
