WAXWINGS posing beautifully

I perhaps had more anticipation & excitement than most to see some Waxwings as I have been very 'late to the party' and these are the first I've seen! Patch birds are always more satisfying so the (optimistic) plan was for my first Waxwing sighting to be on patch but with Winter disappearing and the weather getting distinctly warmer I finally caved and went to see the Newton Abbot birds.

The location certainly felt a bit odd for a twitch and walking down a verge next to the A38 has a certain vulnerability to it! There are some barriers in place but if a vehicle crashed there and hit a birder it'd be almost certain death... I saw the birds 15 mins after arrival then tracked them to some trees where they were resting between periods of feeding and drinking. They were very vocal so keeping track of them was fairly easy despite the noise of the busy Devon Expressway. 11 Waxwings spent most of the time distantly up in trees but would occasionally fly down to the favoured feeding area in the central reservation and pose for some photos. They were a bit more flighty than I was expecting (having seen video footage of them sitting lazily) and they would feed for perhaps 5 - 10 seconds before flying back over the road and into trees. The weather wasn't on my side; there was dense cloud cover so the backgrounds in the pics are a boring grey rather than a nice blue. Still, patience paid off eventually and I managed a few pics that I'm happy with.

*Gav has asked about the pic with two birds being the same bird copied twice which is partly correct in that some of the left bird had parts borrowed from another pic so that I could remove an obscuring branch in the foreground. He is right that I should have perhaps mentioned it so my apologies if anyone felt uneasy about that.