Cedar Waxwings are notorious fruit and berry eaters. Zoologists consider them among the most frugivorous birds – a bird that thrives mostly on fruit and fruit-like produce of plants – in North America. Even their name is a reference to their frugivorous diets, they especially love cedar berries.
In the fall large flocks can descend on a berry-bearing tree, shrub, or vine and strip it clean in minutes. If it is a ‘late-season’ harvest and the fruit is beginning to ferment, the birds can sometimes devour so many overripe berries that they get drunk and fall off limbs. Worse, if the berries are toxic, like nandina, birds can die.
But Cedar Waxwings do not live by fruit alone. In Spring and Summer, they can ‘sally forth’ and take insects on the wing in a dazzling display of fly-catching aeronautics that make a flycatcher proud.
This foraging technique is called ‘hawking’. Waxwings will gather as a flock in trees and ‘hawk’ insects by ‘sallying’ (flying) from a perch to snap up their prey on the wing. Similar targeting overly burdened berry trees\shrubs, waxwings like to take advantage of a mass insect emergence. Ponds and streams are often home to insect species known for large hatches making the skies over them prime sites for Cedar Waxwing ‘hawking’.
