A rhapsody of waxwings

So, I was about to drink my tea, dinnertime today, you know, mid-day. And I saw out the window a great flutter of birds arriving at the tops of the big poplars.

I figured waxwings but the first bird I looked closely at was a robin. Two or three robins were mixing with a flock of a hundred or 120 waxwings.

That number, by the way, is by the excellent method of counting flocking birds which I learnt from my late friend John Wells, a famous birder in these parts: "There's five, that means this is ten, which makes twenty here, and fifty here, and a hundred here, etc."

All the waxwings I could see clearly showed an orange undertail, so I propose to you a rhapsody of Bohemian waxwings dropt by our neighbourhood today.

(I am not the first to think of using "rhapsody" for them, so don't give me any credit for it . . . but I do know the etymology of rhapsody is nearly perfect.)

They stayed five or six minutes and then, all in one lift, they left, robins and all.