Pictures: Teus Luijendijk

12 March 2005, Wageningen Ge

12 March 2005, Wageningen Ge

A most probable escape. But as with many of these, discussion started among birders whether or not it might just be possible that it concerned a genuine vagrant. The fact that it turned up in a group of Waxwings Bombycilla garrulus made it so much more exciting than, e.g., a lone bird. Common Waxwings in Europe are known to mostly have an eastern origin and there are actually birds known from ringing programs that were ringed in Poland and turned up in Siberia, one of them even near the city of Chita. This is 5852 km from Warsaw, and approx. 1500 km west of the city of Chabarovsk, where Japanese Waxwing is common.
So could it just have followed the Asian Waxwings on their way to Europe???