Cedar Waxwing song and call

A Cedar Waxwing sounds like a whisper you almost cannot hear: a very high, thin, lisping whistle, zeee or sree, and a short buzzy trill about half a second long, given over and over by a whole flock as it swirls into a fruit tree or streams overhead. The birds have no true song, only these calls, but they use them constantly, especially in flight. The pitch is high enough that some people never hear waxwings at all.

The song: there is not one

Waxwings skipped the songbird part of being a songbird. There is no territorial song, because they barely hold territories; they nest in loose groups and spend the rest of the year in flocks. What they have instead is a small set of extremely high calls. Audubon lists a high-pitched trill and a thin lisping tseee; Wikipedia describes very high whistles and buzzy trills about half a second long; the Missouri field guide calls it a short, high-pitched, whizzy zeeee.

Multiply that by thirty birds and you get the real sound of the species: a soft, sizzling shimmer that seems to come from everywhere at once as the flock settles into a juniper or a crabapple. It is the sound of the tree, not of a bird. The other giveaway is that the calls keep going in flight, so a tight flock passing overhead trails a faint hiss behind it.

The call, and who cannot hear it

The two notes are a thin, level whistle and a shorter, buzzier trill. Both sit at the top of the human hearing range, and the Missouri Department of Conservation notes plainly that some people cannot hear them. If a companion points at a bare tree full of sleek crested birds and asks whether you hear them, and you hear nothing, it is not a trick. Younger ears pick waxwings out of the sky routinely; older ears often find them by the flock alone.

When and where you hear it

Cedar Waxwings occur across nearly all of North America south of the Arctic, nesting in open woods from southern Canada across the northern United States and wintering from the southern states to Central America and northern South America. But the map is only a guide. Waxwings are nomads that follow fruit, and where they breed and where they winter shifts from one year to the next with the berry crop. A town can have hundreds all winter and none the next. Some flocks linger far south into late spring.

In Missouri the field guide files them as a common migrant, an uncommon winter resident and a rare breeder, which is a fair summary of most of the country's middle: you see them passing through, in flocks of 30 to 100 from August onward and hundreds in winter, wherever there are fruiting trees. Look in forest edges, streamsides, orchards, parks, cemeteries, golf courses and yards with cedars, dogwoods, hollies, serviceberries or crabapples. They love running water and bathe in shallow creeks. In Warble they are a flock catch: you will hear five before you see one.

Everything about the bird runs on fruit. Berries and small fruits make up most of the year's diet, swallowed whole, and in summer the birds also sally out over water for insects like a flycatcher. They nest late, mostly from mid-summer, and they feed berries to the nestlings, which few birds do. Courting pairs pass a berry or a petal back and forth, and birds on a branch will hand one down the line until someone eats it. Overripe, fermenting fruit sometimes leaves a flock visibly drunk.

What it looks like

A sleek, medium-small bird, five and a half to almost seven inches, that looks airbrushed: silky brown on the head and chest fading to gray on the wings and rump, a pale yellow belly, a swept-back crest, and a narrow black mask edged in white. The tail ends in a crisp yellow band, or orange in birds that ate the berries of introduced honeysuckle while growing those feathers. The red wax-like tips on the inner wing feathers give the family its name. Males and females look alike; juveniles are streaky and lack the mask but already have the yellow tail band.

Birds that sound similar

• ?
  Bohemian Waxwing

  Its call is a similar high, lisping seeee, but harsher and more grating. Bohemians are winter wanderers of the Northwest and the northern plains that sometimes reach New England, and they are larger and grayer with rusty undertail feathers.

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  Golden-crowned Kinglet

  A kinglet's call is also a thin, very high note, but it comes as a wiry, rising ti-ti-ti from one or two birds inside a conifer, often followed by a tumbling chatter. Waxwing notes are level or falling and come from a flock in a fruit tree or in the open sky.

Where the Cedar Waxwing card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Cedar Waxwing appears in 45 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated September 30, 2026.