Length -- 7 to 8 inches. About one-fifth smaller than the robin.
Male -- Upper parts rich grayish brown, with plum-colored tints
showing through the brown on crest, throat, breast, wings, and
tail. A velvety-black line on forehead runs through the eye and
back of crest. Chin black; crest conspicuous; breast lighter
than the back, and shading into yellow underneath. Wings have
quill-shafts of secondaries elongated, and with brilliant
vermilion tips like drops of sealing-wax, rarely seen on tail
quills, which have yellow bands across the end.
Female -- With duller plumage, smaller crest, and narrower
tail-band.
Range -- North America, from northern British provinces to
Central America in winter.
Migrations -- A roving resident, without fixed seasons for
migrating.
As the cedar birds travel about in great flocks that quickly exhaust their
special food in a neighborhood, they necessarily lead a nomadic life -- here
to-day, gone to-morrow -- and, like the Arabs, they "silently steal away." It
is surprising how very little noise so great a company of these birds make at
any time. That is because they are singularly gentle and refined; soft of
voice, as they are of color, their plumage suggesting a fine Japanese
water-color painting on silk, with its beautiful sheen and exquisitely blended
tints.
One listens in vain for a song; only a lisping "Twee-twee-ze," or "a dreary
whisper," as Minot calls their low-toned communications with each other,
reaches our ears from their high perches in the cedar trees, where they sit,
almost motionless hours at a time, digesting the enormous quantities of
juniper and whortleberries, wild cherries, worms, and insects upon which they
have gormandized.
Nuttall gives the cedar birds credit for excessive politeness to each other.
He says he has often seen them passing a worm from one to another down a whole
row of beaks and back again before it was finally eaten.
When nesting time arrives -- that is to say, towards the end of the summer --
they give up their gregarious habits and live in pairs, billing and kissing
like turtle-doves in the orchard or wild crabtrees, where a flat, bulky nest
is rather carelessly built of twigs, grasses, feathers, strings -- any odds
and ends that may be lying about. The eggs are usually four, white tinged with
purple and spotted with black.
Apparently they have no moulting season; their plumage is always the same,
beautifully neat and full-feathered. Nothing ever hurries or flusters them,
their greatest concern apparently being, when they alight, to settle
themselves comfortably between their over-polite friends, who are never guilty
of jolting or crowding. Few birds care to take life so easily, not to say
indolently.
Among the French Canadians they are called Recollet, from the color of their
crest resembling the hood of the religious order of that name. Every region
the birds pass through, local names appear to be applied to them, a few of the
most common of which are given above.
Of the three waxwings known to scientists, two are found in America, and the
third in Japan,