DOERING: Brilliant red winterberries shine amid the muted tones of this season, and throughout the winter they feed fruit-loving birds like waxwings. But as BirdNote®’s Mary McCann tells us; the birds themselves were once believed to shine even brighter.

BirdNote®
Waxwing Nightlight
Written by Rick Wright

MCCANN: For the better part of two thousand years, the waxwing was credited with an amazing power.

It was believed in all earnestness that these gentle, crested fruit-eaters glowed in the dark.

Pliny reported that their feathers were said to “shine like flames” in the dark forests of central Europe. The Latin scholar Solinus went further: Not only did waxwings throw off a warm glow, he said, the Germans used captive birds to light their way when they were obliged to travel by night.

But at the end of the sixteenth century, the great Italian bird man Ulysses Aldrovandi was skeptical. In his twelve-volume encyclopedia of ornithology, Aldrovandi admits that the waxy red tips on the bird’s wing feathers are beautiful, but he dismisses the notion that they give off any kind of light.

How could he be so sure?

“For nearly three months,” he writes, “I kept a waxwing alive in my house and observed it through the night.” He goes on to note the bird stubbornly failed to emit flames or light of any kind.

Today, no one thinks that waxwings glow in the dark. But that doesn’t stop these winter nomads from brightening the birdwatcher’s day.

I’m Mary McCann.

DOERING: For pictures, fly over to the Living on Earth website at loe dot org.