Nature's own wino, the Cedar Waxwing

Some people mark the season’s change by the blossoming of cherry trees or the thawing of frozen ponds. In my household, we have our own harbinger of spring: The yearly arrival of a very boozy bird, the Cedar Waxwing.

A flock of several dozen shows up at once and perches in the tall trees. On bare oak branches, they’re a gaudy sight–citron-yellow bellies, crimson-striped wings, and thick black eyeliner.

Then, they spot the red holly berries by the front door. They descend upon my front yard like a bachelorette party on Sixth Street, flapping and cawing and (occasionally) passing out on the sidewalk. They flit about and gobble the berries with gusto, their black beaks diving for them and tossing them back two or three at a time.

Sarah took this photo of a (live) Cedar Waxwing on our front porch.

One crisp Sunday morning, not too long after I moved into this house, I was having coffee in the kitchen. I heard a swarm of the birds hit my window with a barrage of icky thuds. Their tiny corpses littered the front steps and I was horrified. I had never seen a Cedar Waxwing, certainly never up close. With their neon yellow feathers they looked like a tropical bird–too exotic to be hanging out in a North Dallas subdivision, too beautiful to be suddenly dead.

I didn’t know then that the birds were drunk. I blamed myself: For having second-story windows, for not trimming the tree branches back, for being a human whose actions are messing up the climate and changing the migratory patterns of all the critters, leading them to end up in places where they shouldn’t be.

These days, I know that the Cedar Waxwing regularly stumbles through Texas from its winter home in Mexico and the Caribbean, and that my neighborhood is right in their path. Among bird people, their late-winter berry bacchanals are a noted event. Audubon has published guidelines for helping the birds sleep it off, and local animal shelters have even set up “drunk tanks” in the past to collect intoxicated birds and protect them from predators.

And so, it happens around this time of year. The Cedar Waxwings get trashed and fall from trees, or smack into the upstairs windows. Nothing we can do will stop them. They are too wasted to care about window decals, or fake owls, or us shouting and waving and throwing stuff. They want that fun berry juice, and they want it now.

Of the dozens or hundreds that arrive to feast on berries, a few will tumble from the heights onto the ground below. Sometimes, they’re merely stunned. Left alone, they will get up and fly away. Other times…well, no.

For several days at the end of February or beginning of March, my morning routine includes one additional task: Bird recovery. Gingerly, I open the door, scanning the stoop for birds, checking them for signs of life, and discreetly removing them before they can make my wife cry. (If you’re reading this, babe, all the birds are always fine. I promise.)

I pray for a quick death for the birds who don’t make it. And I pray for rain. (The after-effects of their berry buffet absolutely wreck my driveway and car.) After less than a week, they’ve stripped the entire tree of fruit and they move on.

I find a morbid curiosity comes along with this annual chore. The berry binge is sometimes deadly–but is it fun? We know that there are animals besides humans–monkeys and dolphins, for example–who appear to get drunk or high on purpose. But those are social mammals, like us. How about birds?

Science tells us that many species of birds gorge themselves on fermented fruit, and likely have done so since forever. (Definitely long before there were suburbanites to pick them up with towels and place them in ventilated cardboard boxes, as Audubon recommends.) But do they like the feeling, or does it frighten them? Do they seek out the thrill of intoxication, or are they only drawn to the ripe berries’ sweetness?

A little science here: The longer the berries stay on the tree, the higher their sugar levels rise. Freezing and dry winter air can also concentrate the sugars. As the weather warms enough to allow for fermentation, ambient yeasts turn some of that available sugar into ethanol.

How much? Not very much. Some estimates say that the alcohol concentration of ripe fermented tree berries rarely exceeds one or two percent. The National Wildlife Health Center, collecting samples of holly berries found near dead birds in the Houston area, measured the fruit’s ethanol content at 800 parts per million by weight, equal to .08 percent.

That’s nowhere close even to near beer (.5%) or light beer (5%). But for birds–who aren’t equipped to metabolize alcohol like we are–it can be a toxic concentration. Among fruit-eating species (which have evolved some tolerance to alcohol due to their high-sugar diets), the younger birds are thought to be the most easily affected.

A Yaupon holly tree in winter (otherwise known as the bar for birds).

That lends credence to the idea that the birds don’t intend to get drunk, and it’s all very sad. Compared to human drinkers, they are novices and they are lightweights.

As a wine student, I’m cultivating in my own life a deep and loving relationship with wine. Part of that love includes intoxication–the edges of it, the excess of it, all the nuances of all the things it can make you feel. It’s a part of being a human, and humans will likely never separate themselves from the allure of the altered state.

But right next to that understanding is the fact that alcohol is a poison and drunkenness is often not pretty. I confront that truth as I gather up the broken body of the bird whose velvety feathers are stained with berry juice from every orifice, whose first bender was probably also its last.

I think about the first time I got way too drunk by mistake and how bad it felt. I reflect with horror on the times I almost died doing stupid shit while under the influence–or people that I know almost died–and I feel sad. Getting tanked during a cross-country trip is not a safe thing to do. But at least we have a choice.

Yes, I did have to clean up bird bodies today. That’s the reason for this rather elegiac post about Texas’s own avian wino. I apologize for the tone shift–I know I went from “hahaha drunk birbs WTF” to “Nature is freaking cruel” in just over 1000 words.

I’ll be toasting the gentle Cedar Waxwing with a suitable berry beverage later this week. (Holly berries are poisonous to humans, but maybe a Cosmo?) And to all the tipsy birdies: I hope you enjoy this beautiful spring day, and fly safe out there.