[CT Birds] Storrs - lots o'waxwings

[Chris Elphick]

Today on the UConn campus there were at least 260 (probably more) cedar waxwings in the area immediately south of the main library and the Dodd Center.  I searched hard for Bohemians, but no luck.  

There were, however, lots with orange in the tail tips - it seems like the frequency of this diet-induced trait is increasing, but I don't have any numbers to back that idea up.  There was a lot of variation in how orange the tail tips were too.  Only a few were really bright orange, but many others seemed more intermediate and some clearly had orange only on a few of their tail feathers (suggesting that they were feeding on the introduced plant berries that cause the orange for only a part of the moulting period).

No luck with the pine grosbeaks, which I do not think have been seen with certainty since last Friday (though I did hear one comment to the contrary).  There is a lot of fruit around of campus, though, so they may have just found a different spot.  Incidentally, on the Storrs CBC on Saturday, pine grosbeaks were also seen at a site in Ashford (Lipp's Road, I think).

Chris
 

Chris Elphick
Storrs, CT
elphick at sbcglobal.net