Mar 07, 2011: (cited from Russian source) “Waxwings are incredibly voracious. They cannot bite through berries and swallow them whole, very fast, taking them from twigs one by one. Each bird during one day can eat so much berries that their total weight will be much more then the weight of the bird. Waxwings even cannot digest their food completely: their excrements are almost all made of half-digested berries and peels”.

This inability to bite through was especially well seen on a video: apples were flying among birds here and there. Like pigeons, waxwings could not bite a piece from an apple, so they grasped it with their beaks and then shook their heads to detach the piece in the beak from the rest of the apple. Thus, the rest of the apple was set to fly. How did they manage not to hit each other with flying apples? That`s a riddle for me.

species Bohemian waxwing Bombycilla garrulus