On Saturday morning, while I was uploading the photos of the Common Yellowthroat in the apple tree, a flock of at least a dozen of these flew into the same tree.

These are Cedar Waxwings, Bombycilla cedrorum. The flock flew in, swarming the tree. Again, I don’t know what they were after. I suspect they were after insects in the tree. Who knows how they knew they were there.

I noticed the crests, but couldn’t make out much else of them. I wasn’t able to id these birds until just now, when I took my first look at the photos. I didn’t say anything about them earlier because I didn’t want to promise something and not deliver! As before, most of the shots were of branches, foliage, and flowers. This was the best of the bunch. I was further frustrated by the fact that, when they nosily arrived, my compact flash card was busy copying the previous photos to my hard drive. I couldn’t get the card back into the camera to take more pictures until that was done, which cost me precious minutes. Time to get another card, perhaps.

This is a lifetime first for me. As far as I know, I’ve never seen this species before. And there they were, just 10 feet away from me standing in my tree fort in Brooklyn. When I was looking at the photo above, I showed it to my partner. I asked, “Do you have any idea what this is?” I didn’t know. I thought I didn’t. Then I said, “I have an idea. Maybe it’s a waxwing?”

Where does that come from? At what point in my life did I subconsciously absorb the keys for Cedar Waxwing to the degree that when I saw a bird I’d never seen before, that was the first thing that came to mind?!

Again, the photo above is a crop of the original, though not as tight a crop as that of the Yellowthroat, so they should be easier to find. Here’s the original, full-frame image. Can you spot the waxwings?

Look who just visited us in our neighbor’s apple tree less than an hour ago:

This is a male Common Yellowthroat, Geothlypis trichas, one of the infamously confusing warblers.

This is also a great example of how digital photography and blogging has transformed my way of looking at things. I grabbed the camera instead of the binoculars. Not only did I want to see the bird clearly enough to identify it, I wanted to share what I saw. The immediacy of sharing is a bonus.

I had just woken up, started a pot of coffee on the stove, and walked out onto my tree fort to admire the apple tree. I caught a flash of yellow on the branches. I tried to find it again among the apple blossoms. I saw it was a warbler, but it was moving too quickly to observe it for long.

I went back inside and got my camera. With a zoom to 135mm (35mm equivalent about 150-160mm) and motor drive, I started trying to capture the quickly moving bird. It was a challenge. The auto-focus kept trying to focus on the flowers, rather than the bird. Sometimes, it couldn’t focus on anything at all. He was moving rapidly, flicking clusters of blossoms with his beak, then moving off. I don’t know if he was after insects in the flowers, or the flowers themselves.

The photo above makes it look like he was inches away. This is a crop of the best of 31 shots I took in a few minutes. Here’s the original, full-frame image. Can you find the warbler in this picture?

The apple tree itself is magnificent this year. Covered in blossoms. Lots of flowers means we will have lots of apples later in the year. And lots of apples means lots of parrots. Something to look forward to for the fall.