 Last year, I saw one cedar waxwing only, and, as you can see from the photo below, I didn't get a very good shot of it.
But this year, I've seen a handful of them at two different locations. This picture was taken at a park in Highlands, NJ. It is testament to how poor a look I got at the bird last year that I didn't recognize it this time. What an exciting bird to stumble upon.
Actually, there were a pair of them, but this was the only one I managed to take a picture of. If you're having trouble with the perspective of the shot, I was standing almost exactly beneath the the bird, pointing my camera straight up. So, the bird is not hanging from the branch; he's standing on it.
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 Here's last year's picture. The only thing to be said for it is that I didn't have to go far to take it! I was stood on our front doorstep. I recall having a premonition that a bird was going to appear in the tree in question and the waxwing appeared. In only 2 of the seventeen shots I fired off was the bird's head even partially visible.
No wonder I didn't recognize the pair of birds at Highlands.
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 Friday evening (July12, 2002), Pam and I were walking at Deal Test Site when we spied three cedar waxwings. They were flying around the grass and returning to the same tree. It looked as though they were plucking insects out of the air, returning to the tree to devour them (but, I've been wrong about interpreting bird behavior before: do they even eat insects?).
As you can see from this picture, the light was low and fading. That's the shadow of a branch across its body.
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 How often do you go back to the same tree the next day and find nothing? Well, this was an exception. There on the same tree, but a lower branch, was another cedar waxwing. Is it the same bird? I think not. The coloration doesn't seem to have quite the same pattern where the brownish feathers meet the yellow ones on its lower abdomen.
Once again, I regretted not having enough zoom on my camera. As I edged towards the bird, it became visibly nervous.
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 Fortunately, before flying off, it turned its back allowing me to take this picture (which I also used as the cover shot for this section).
I'm really pleased with these pictures, but I must find a way of eking some more zoom out of my camera. Currently, I'm using a Canon C-8 1.6x teleconverter. I have a second one, but the quality of the pictures I take with both on the front just isn't quite good enough for my taste.
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