A winter visitor to Japan that gathers in flocks to eat berries.
It has a plump body and a yellow tail tip.
Bohemian Waxwings show large year-to-year changes in numbers reaching southern parts of their range in winter. One study compared up to 41 years of breeding counts in Finland and Sweden, winter counts across northern Europe, the UK and Poland, and the abundance of rowanberries, a key winter food. Many years with large southern arrivals followed autumns with abundant rowanberries in Finland, near the northern breeding range. When Finnish crops were poor, waxwings tended to arrive farther south earlier. The study found no support for abundant rowanberries in southern areas drawing the birds there; the timing and scale of movement related in complex ways to food conditions in the north.
Rowanberries tend to have large crops every two to three years. Some movements south occurred later in winter, after an abundant northern crop had been depleted.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern (LC) · Global species-level assessment
The 2016 global IUCN Red List assessment classifies the Bohemian Waxwing as Least Concern (LC). The assessment covers the species globally.