The Cherry Birds

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The cedar waxwings swarmed the backyard this afternoon—at least a thousand of them.… Poor trees. They looked so patient in the snow, so resigned to being stripped of their color for the sake of the birds.
—ANGELA PELSTER, “LES OISEAUX”

IN 1908, A BILL came before the Vermont legislature, “an act relating to the protection of fruit from the cedar waxwing.” The title was rather euphemistic: H.474 proposed protecting fruit by removing protection for the cedar waxwing, a fruitloving common songbird with a gluttonous streak. Quite simply, the fruit growers wanted to shoot the birds, and they convinced the members of the House to pass the bill.

But then the bill reached the Senate. And just as the prosecution in a murder trial might show the jury moving, carefree photos of a victim taken at an earlier time, waxwing supporters brought in mounted specimens of the bird in question. The senators laid eyes on the birds—their bright beige bodies accented by red and yellow etchings, sleek black masks, crests—and dropped the bill just like that.

Or so we are told. The internet is awash in regurgitations of this anecdote, which seems to trace back to Edward H. Forbush, an early twentieth-century ornithologist, who included it in a profile of the waxwing for Bird-Lore, a publication of the Audubon Society, a few years after the failure of the proposed bill. “[The bird’s] beauty conquered and the bill was defeated,” he asserts.

I’ve been reading about waxwings since I pulled in the driveway one hot day last summer and saw my housemate cupping a wounded bird in her hands. Its plumage was impeccable, but when she parted the mouse-colored softness on its back to inspect where her cat had gouged it, the wound looked deep.

As a birder, I think of myself as above the blinding allure of charismatically pretty colors; I’d gladly spend an afternoon chasing the drabbest of sparrows through a meadow for one good glimpse, if the species was rare enough or one I’d never seen. But before the waxwing fluttered away and flopped to the ground, before I turned away and went inside so as not to see the cat finish it off, we stood there in the driveway guiltily admiring the finer points of its plumage.

From a distance, a waxwing is a buffy brownish gray. Up close, this one’s beauty was subtle but exotic. The neutral tones melded exquisitely—the rose-beige back bleeding into a dove gray that verged on pale