The male Northern Cardinal is perhaps responsible
for getting more people to open up a field guide than any other
bird. Theyre a perfect combination of familiarity, conspicuousness,
and style: a shade of red you cant take your eyes off. Even
the brown females sport a sharp crest and warm red accents. Cardinals
dont migrate and they dont molt into a dull plumage,
so theyre still breathtaking in winters snowy backyards.
In summer, their sweet whistles are one of the first sounds of the
morning.
At a Glance
Habitat
|
Food
|
Nesting
|
Behavior
|
Conservation
|
|
|
|
|
|
Open Woodland
|
Seeds
|
Shrub
|
Ground Forager
|
Least
Concern
|
Measurements
Both Sexes
Length
8.39.1 in
2123 cm
Wingspan
9.812.2 in
2531 cm
Weight
1.51.7 oz
4248 g
Relative Size
Slightly smaller than an
American Robin
Other Names
Cardinal rouge (French)
Cardenal rojo, Cardenal
norteño, Cardenal
común (Spanish) |
Cool Facts
- Only a few female North American songbirds sing, but the
female Northern Cardinal does, and often while sitting on the
nest. This may give the male information about when to bring food
to the nest. A mated pair shares song phrases, but the female
may sing a longer and slightly more complex song than the male.
- Many people are perplexed each spring by the sight of a cardinal
attacking its reflection in a window, car mirror, or shiny bumper.
Both males and females do this, and most often in spring and early
summer when they are obsessed with defending their territory against
any intruders. Birds may spend hours fighting these intruders
without giving up. A few weeks later, as levels of aggressive
hormones subside, these attacks should end (though one female
kept up this behavior every day or so for six months without stopping).
- The male cardinal fiercely defends its breeding territory
from other males. When a male sees its reflection in glass surfaces,
it frequently will spend hours fighting the imaginary intruder.
- A perennial favorite among people, the Northern Cardinal
is the state bird of seven states.
- The oldest recorded Northern Cardinal was 15 years 9 months
old.
Habitat
Look for Northern Cardinals in dense shrubby areas
such as forest edges, overgrown fields, hedgerows, backyards, marshy
thickets, mesquite, regrowing forest, and ornamental landscaping.
Cardinals nest in dense foliage and look for conspicuous, fairly
high perches for singing. Growth of towns and suburbs across eastern
North America has helped the cardinal expand its range northward.
Food
Northern Cardinals eat mainly seeds and fruit, supplementing
these with insects (and feeding nestlings mostly insects). Common
fruits and seeds include dogwood, wild grape, buckwheat, grasses,
sedges, mulberry, hackberry, blackberry, sumac, tulip-tree, and
corn. Cardinals eat many kinds of birdseed, particularly black oil
sunflower seed. They also eat beetles, crickets, katydids, leafhoppers,
cicadas, flies, centipedes, spiders, butterflies, and moths.
Nesting Facts
Clutch Size
25 eggs
Number of Broods
1-2 broods
Egg Length
0.91.1 in
2.22.7 cm
Egg Width
0.70.8 in
1.72 cm
Incubation Period
1113 days
Nestling Period
713 days
Egg Description
Grayish white, buffy white,
or greenish white speckled
with pale gray to brown.
Condition at Hatching
Naked except for sparse
tufts of grayish down,
eyes
closed, clumsy.
|
Nesting
Nest Description
Males sometimes bring nest material to the female, who does most
of the building. She crushes twigs with her beak until theyre
pliable, then turns in the nest to bend the twigs around her body
and push them into a cup shape with her feet. The cup has four layers:
coarse twigs (and sometimes bits of trash) covered in a leafy mat,
then lined with grapevine bark and finally grasses, stems, rootlets,
and pine needles. The nest typically takes 3 to 9 days to build;
the finished product is 2-3 inches tall, 4 inches across, with an
inner diameter of about 3 inches. Cardinals usually dont use
their nests more than once.
Nest Placement
A week or two before the female starts building, she
starts to visit possible nest sites with the male following along.
The pair call back and forth and hold nesting material in their
bills as they assess each site. Nests tend to be wedged into a fork
of small branches in a sapling, shrub, or vine tangle, 1-15 feet
high and hidden in dense foliage. They use many kinds of trees and
shrubs, including dogwood, honeysuckle, hawthorn, grape, redcedar,
spruce, pines, hemlock, rose bushes, blackberry brambles, elms,
sugar maples, and box elders.
Behavior
Northern Cardinals hop through low branches and forage on or
near the ground. Cardinals commonly sing and preen from a high branch
of a shrub. The distinctive crest can be raised and pointed when
agitated or lowered and barely visible while resting. You typically
see cardinals moving around in pairs during the breeding season,
but in fall and winter they can form fairly large flocks of a dozen
to several dozen birds. During foraging, young birds give way to
adults and females tend to give way to males. Cardinals sometimes
forage with other species, including Dark-eyed Juncos, White-throated
Sparrows, other sparrow species, Tufted Titmice, goldfinches, and
Pyrrhuloxias. They fly somewhat reluctantly on their short, round
wings, taking short trips between thickets while foraging. Pairs
may stay together throughout winter, but up to 20 percent of pairs
split up by the next season.
Conservation
Populations are generally in good shape. The expansion of people
and their backyards over the last two centuries has been good for
cardinals. However, habitat loss in southeastern California, at the
edge of the cardinals range, may cause the disappearance of
the cardinal population there.
|
|
juvenile
|
range
|
|