Nature Bulletin No. The fawn hues on its neck and chest shade into yellowish flanks, a warm brown back, and grayish blue on the wings and tail. A little larger than a bluebird, its crest, black mask across the eyes, black chin, and yellow band at the end of the tail are conspicuous and distinctive. Usually, on the tips of the inner wing feathers of both males and females, there are shiny red appendages like blobs of sealing wax.
Nobody knows why, nor why they sometimes occur also at the tips of the tail feathers.
In summer, cedar waxwings consume great numbers of small moths, cankerworms, leaf-eating beetles and potato beetles. Most of the year they are primarily fruit eaters that gorge themselves with the little blue berries on cedars and junipers, black cherries and choke cherries, blueberries and blackberries, wild grapes, the berries on Virginia creeper and poison ivy, those on honeysuckle, buckthorn and dogwood bushes, and the fruits of alder, hawthorn, mulberry, hackberry and mountain ash trees. They breed in southern Canada from Quebec to British Columbia, and in the United States as far south as Georgia, Arkansas and New Mexico. A few are summer residents in the Chicago region, nesting regularly at Morton Arboretum and, this year, near the Little Red Schoolhouse nature center. Cedar waxwings nest later than most birds, from 6 to 35 feet up in the horizontal branches of trees and shrubs.