What's Missing on this Cedar Waxwing?

Have you ever been looking at a bird that you see regularly and suddenly realized that something is amiss and just can't put your finger on it? It's like seeing a friend or a co-worker for the first time after they get new glasses, or change hair styles. When things are familiar to us we take their appearance for granted, causing us to not notice subtle differences that we've probably looked at unconsciously many times.  

A couple weekends ago I was taking pictures of a Cedar Waxwing on the North Spit of Coos Bay, Coos County, Oregon and realized that something wasn't right. After a few moments of looking at the bird, it occurred to me that it had no red on its wings. I pointed this out to the others in our group (veteran birders all) and none of us could recall seeing an apparent adult waxwing without the waxy red tips on its secondaries. There was some speculation that perhaps the red tips wear off late in the plumage cycle (waxwings molt once a year in the fall), but none of us knew for sure why this bird was missing the very feature for which it is named.  

Upon returning home, this episode slipped my mind until I started editing the pictures I had taken that day. Figuring that there had to be some logical explanation for the absence of red in this bird's wings, I consulted Birds of North America Online (BNA) and found my answer. 

A Cedar Waxwing does not acquire waxy red-tipped secondaries until they are replaced during the bird's second prebasic molt, approximately 15 months after hatching. Although waxwings go through a prebasic molt in their first fall (3-4  months after hatching), flight feathers are not replaced. Thus, a first summer bird, which otherwise presents the appearance of an adult, will be sporting flight feathers from its juvenile plumage -- the first full set of feathers after the downy hatchling stage. Like many first year birds, one-year-old Cedar Waxwings generally don't breed. In fact, the BNA account (Witmer et al. 1997) suggests that the waxy tips may be "status symbols" that have some function in mate selection. In our case, we can use this visual clue to know with some degree of certainty that we are looking at a one-year-old bird. 

Funny the things that you notice when you take the time to look closely at birds that are normally dismissed with little more than a passing glance. I can't begin to count the thousands of Cedar Waxwings I've seen over the past 30+ years, or how many of those, like this one, were seen during late summer and early fall while I was looking for rare shorebirds along Oregon's outer coast. Sheepishly, I'm left to wonder how many were first summer birds that I looked at without realizing that they were missing something...until now. 

Literature Cited:

Witmer, M.C., D. J. Mountjoy and L. Elliot. 1997. Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedorum), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/309doi:10.2173/bna.309