Irruption of the waxwings

Once thought to have presaged the First World War, these exquisite European songbirds are a blessing to our shores, says Mark Cocker

- Mark Cocker

ASI stood this Christmas watching one of the largest flocks of Bohemian waxwings ever recorded in Derbyshire, I overheard someone say: ‘They are amazing. I wonder if I will ever see something like this again?’ I understood exactly what they meant.

The birds can sit for long minutes in treetops, where they seem stolid, silent and no more exciting than creatures the size and shape of common starlings. Then, suddenly, they erupt, swooping into bushes en masse to feed. In passages of intense activity, they clamber through the thorn, wings opening and closing, tails spread fan-like and strong feet clamping them to the flimsiest of twigs as they stretch, sometimes upside down, to reach for the furthest berries. In these moments, they remind me of tiny parrots.

Together with all this hectic activity, the thorn background allows the waxwing colours to ignite. They possess what is perhaps the most exquisitely structured plumage of any European songbird. Befitting an inhabitant of far-northern Scandinavia and Russia, the feathering is dense, almost fur-like, but of the softest, pinkish grey with touches of ginger and maroon. To these quiet shades, Nature has added delicate refinements: glorious saffron tips to its tail; lovely lines of white and lemon inscribed along the margins of the flight feathers; and then weird little knobs that look like sealing wax dripped onto the ends of several pinions. It is these crimson blobs, incidentally, that give the bird its name.

To cap it all are two further astonishing features, which suggest to me the extravagance of old aristocratic fashion. The bird’s ridiculously tall crest that has a hint of those perruque wigs once worn at Versailles; then, there is a thick black line sweeping around the bird’s head, evoking the eye cosmetics favoured by the queens of ancient Egypt.