SOME birds are exciting because they are rare and some because they are very attractive to look at. A privileged handful are both, and one of these select few is a bird called the waxwing.

Now, I aught to qualify the waxwing’s rarity, because sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Waxwings breed in the subarctic, coniferous forests of Scandinavia and Russia and spend their winters further south in continental Europe. Britain is not part of their usual range at all, but in a normal winter odd stragglers find their way over the North Sea to our shores.

This winter is not a normal one. In some years a shortage of food in the birds usual winter quarters prompts huge numbers of them to spread further afield in search of the berries that they feed on. These abnormal migration patterns are called "irruptions" and all the signs indicate that 2016 is a big irruption year.

During the second half of November, flocks of waxwings were seen the length of Britain; 100 in Aberdeenshire, 30 in Newcastle and 41 in Norwich, for instance. Not surprisingly most of the sightings are along the East Coast where the flocks have to make landfall, which is good news for us in Ryedale.

If you have any trees with berries in your garden, like rowan, whitebeam or cotoneaster, it may be double good news because you could spot waxwings from your own living room. These birds may well be exotic, but they are not shy – be prepared for close-up views.

Not sure what to look out for? They are, as one text book eloquently puts it, "…chubby but handsome birds about the size of a starling, mostly pink-beige, with a black mask and bib and a jaunty crest of feathers on the crown".

Incidentally, the bird’s name describes very unusual decorative feathers on its wings. Bright red stalks, said to resemble old fashioned sealing wax, protrude from some of the secondary feather ends.

If you would love to catch a glimpse of these endearing birds, but your local berry bush doesn't seem to be doing the trick, you can consult twitter @WaxwingsUK where an ongoing record of sightings is being compiled.

Scanning through the entries for our area I discounted Scarborough as too far away and Pickering’s entry as not recent enough so plumped for Helmsley as my best chance of a sighting.

Local artist Jonathan Pomroy reported seeing them on a warm day in November catching flies at the medical centre in Carlton Road - eating nothing but berries must get boring after a while.

The most recent sighting, however, was on a road called The Limes, part of a housing estate near the medical centre, so this was where I started my search. I wandered around all of roads of the estate, doing my best not to appear to be looking into bedrooms with my binoculars, but all to no avail; the waxwings had moved on.

My decision to make the most of a nice sunny day and amble up the old railway line towards Kirkbymoorside proved a good one. The shaded trackbed of the old cutting was still frozen solid and good to walk on.

Winter robins sang their melancholy songs and the odd wren flitted in the undergrowth in a desperate search for food. A small flock of starlings settled into a nearby field-boundary hedgerow, but when I trained my binoculars onto then they turned out to be something else entirely.

A smile spread across my face as I realised that these were the very birds I had been looking for - waxwings.

For the next half an hour I was able to watch about 20-25 of them methodically stripping the hawthorn bushes of nutritious berries before heading home a happy, if slightly chilly, man.