The wrentit, which used to be our state bird, has been replaced by the California quail. People who deplore the change, point out that the California quail is only one of 165 members of the family of Phasianidae, whereas the wrentit is the only member in the whole world of his family, the Chamaeidae. His scientific name, Chamaea fasdata, means “fastened to the ground.” Because of his weak flight and home-loving nature, the name may almost be taken literally. Indeed, the porch railing of the second floor of our house is a veritable Matterhorn for the wrentit.
The uniqueness of the little bird is further emphasized by the fact that he inhabits only the Pacific coastal area from southern Oregon to Baja California. This makes him a more strictly regional bird than the California quail, which has been introduced widely throughout the West.
Perhaps the quail was chosen as replacement because he is more easily seen and more colorful than the wrentit, or perhaps because his greeting sounds so hospitable. On almost any hike you can hear the quail’s cheerful throaty voice urging everyone to “sit right down, sit right down.” Birders new to our area are advised not to take the invitation too seriously — it is frequently issued in a canyon overgrown with poison oak. (Poison oak offers quail some protection which they badly need at nesting time. Surely one of the funniest and most touching sights in the avian world is that of newly hatched quail tagging along behind their parents. One fellow birder, Neva Plank, is responsible for what seems the perfect description of them — “walking walnuts.”)
The adjustability of the innately shy wrentits to human conditions can probably be explained by the fact that these birds are not migratory but live out their entire lives in a small circumscribed area. When your world measures only an acre, you can take better stock of it, get to know what’s poison and what’s meat, where the seeds are and where the cats aren’t, when to fly, when to freeze. The bird that must cover hundreds of miles every spring and fall has no chance for such careful scrutiny. If, in spite of this, he adapts easily and well to the presence of people — like the hooded oriole, the black-headed grosbeak, the white-crowned sparrow — we must attribute it to his inborn good nature. In The Life of Birds Welty states that “tameness, shyness and belligerence commonly run in families and are very likely based on hereditary behavior patterns. Phalaropes, puffbirds, kinglets and titmice are relatively tame, confiding birds, while oyster catchers, roseate spoonbills and redshanks are shy, wild species.”
This brings us back to the cedar waxwings. Watch a large flock of them feeding in a pepper tree and you get the impression that they are the most fidgety and nervous of birds. This impression quickly disappears after you’ve had some experience with them. They show little suspicion and fear of either humans or the various contrivances humans have rigged up to protect their ornamental fruits and berries — dangling twists of metal, strips of cloth, plastic windmills from the dimestore, colored discs and Japanese glass chimes. Several times during that winter I put food out as usual and then, instead of going immediately back into the house, I sat down quietly on the ledge. The length of time I had to wait until the waxwings arrived depended on whether the birds were near enough to see the fresh food. If they were, they came down to the ledge without hesitation — either ignoring or accepting my presence, I’m not sure which — and fed themselves within touching distance of me.
Several accounts have been written of how young or injured waxwings adjust to captivity and become as tame and sometimes as mischievous as parakeets. Their amiability toward human beings extends to other birds as well as to each other. They are courteous and affectionate and they never fight among themselves the way most species of birds and mammals do. A probable reason for this is suggested in A. C. Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds. Dr. Arthur A. Allen is quoted to the effect that cedar waxwings “have nothing to gain by fighting, for their food is of such a nature that there is either more of it than they could consume before it spoils or else there is none at all. Since they can fly long distances to feeding places, they do not need to defend a feeding territory about their nests.” This, perhaps, might also account for their lack of song.
Writing in the same volume, Winsor Barrett Tyler refers to the waxwing as the perfect gentleman of the bird world. Certainly this is true as far as dress and deportment are concerned, but at the table the waxwing most resembles a high-spirited child, alternating serious eating with playful antics like tossing food into the air and catching it, at the same time keeping up an incessant noise.
I used to share with many other people the impression that these birds were strictly berry eaters. During the winter of 1961–1962, I learned that berries were not even their favorite food when more exotic items were available. The berries on all our cotoneaster and toyon trees were untouched as long as I kept the ledge supplied with apples and doughnuts and waxwing pudding and a mixture we called raisin-mess. The recipe for the latter was given to us by Mr. Rett, who said he’d used it successfully on the museum grounds to attract warblers. A pound of ground raisins was stirred into a pound of melted beef fat — it took a heap of stirring because the two didn’t want to mix — and when the whole sticky mess was cold and set, it was put into suet feeders or into various crannies and crevices in the bark of a tree. I don’t recall that the mixture attracted many warblers but it was an instant hit with the waxwings as well as the opossums, raccoons and rats.
Waxwing pudding was served in three old ice trays kept out on the ledge. It was a general name we used for any mixture which had moistened bread as its basis, with various other things added according to what was available — sugar, cornmeal, canned fruit, eggs, raisins, leftover mashed potatoes, spaghetti, stuffed green peppers, suet, peanut butter — no combination was too wild for the waxwings, who ate stuff even the omnivorous scrub jays wouldn’t go near.
As to their manner of eating this mixture I can only say that they wolfed it. Since early childhood I’ve heard this expression but I never really understood what wolfing your food meant until a couple of years ago when Pete and Adu Batten acquired a pair of timber wolves, Thomas and Virginia. I happened to be around at feeding time one day. Virginia was about the size of our German shepherd, Brandy, who weighs 105 pounds; Thomas was considerably larger. Both wolves received a large bowl of horsemeat and kibble, but within a fraction of a minute every scrap of food was gone. It was an unbelievable performance on the part of two animals born and raised in captivity and well fed from the beginning.
Naturalists used to believe that this manner of eating on the part of wolves was necessary to ensure their survival, since in their native environment, the Arctic tundra and the boreal forests of Canada, they often had to go for days without capturing any large prey. Therefore, when such food was available it had to be eaten quickly, before it froze in winter or spoiled in summer. It seemed a beautifully logical theory until Canadian biologist Farley Mowat took up residence with wolves in the wild and learned they lived mainly on mice in summer and rabbits in winter. So much for logic.
Meanwhile, some three thousand miles to the southwest our waxwings wolfed their food.
Paul Vercammen is a local bird fancier who at one time in his aviary kept four cedar waxwings in addition to more exotic species like Lady Amherst and golden pheasants. The latter were fed a scientifically balanced mixture in the form of pellets while Paul went to considerable lengths to supply the waxwings with pyracantha berries. People who have kept more than one pet simultaneously, canine, feline, avian or any other, should be able to guess what happened: the pheasants took a liking to pyracantha berries and the waxwings thrived on pheasant pellets for five years. They’d probably still be doing it if Paul hadn’t given them to the Museum of Natural History where they’re back on a more conventional diet.