Bird Profile

Northern Cardinal

The cardinal is the bird most people build a feeding station for, and the one most often driven off by the wrong feeder. It wants a surface to stand on, sunflower or safflower, and cover within a short flight.

The Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) is a heavy-billed, crested songbird of hedgerows and yard edges, roughly 8.5 inches (22 cm) long, that stays put year-round across the eastern and central United States and much of the Southwest. Males are unmistakable: solid red with a black face. Females are warm tan with red highlights and are the better-looking bird once you stop expecting the male.

Cardinals come to feeders readily, but they are picky about the furniture. They are too heavy and too broad to balance on a short tube perch, so the single change that brings them in is a flat surface: a tray, a platform, or a hopper with a real ledge.

This profile covers how to separate cardinals from the birds people confuse them with, what they eat through the year, the feeder and seed setup that works, and the two behaviors that generate the most questions: dawn and dusk feeding, and the male who spends April fighting a window.

How to identify a Northern Cardinal#

The male is the easiest common bird in North America. Nothing else in the eastern US is entirely red, crested, and equipped with a cone-shaped orange-red bill set in a black mask that runs from the throat up around the eyes.

The female is the one worth learning properly. She is a soft grayish-tan or buff-olive with red washed into the crest, wings and tail, a duller gray-black mask, and the same conspicuous orange-red bill. In poor light the bill is the tell: no other tan bird of that size carries a bill that heavy and that brightly colored.

Juveniles look like dull females but have a dark gray to black bill. This is the most common cause of "I have a strange bird that looks like a cardinal but wrong" in late summer. The bill brightens to orange over the fall.

Confusion species#

The Pyrrhuloxia matters only in southern Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas, where the two overlap. If a "gray cardinal" with a parrot-like yellow bill turns up in Tucson, that is what it is.

Where and when you will see cardinals#

Cardinals are year-round residents everywhere they occur. There is no migration to wait for and no season when they leave. Their range covers the eastern half of the US, the Great Plains west to about the eastern edge of the Rockies, the desert Southwest, Florida, and south into Mexico and Central America.

That range is still growing. Over the last century cardinals have spread north and northwest into New England, southern Ontario, Quebec, the northern Midwest and parts of the Great Plains, tracking suburban development, hedgerow planting and year-round feeding. Cardinals were a southern bird in 1900. They are a Maine dooryard bird now.

They favor edges rather than deep woods: hedgerows, overgrown fence lines, thickets, brushy suburban borders and streamside tangles. A yard with a dense shrub layer holds cardinals. A yard of lawn and mature shade trees usually does not, however much seed you put out.

What cardinals eat#

The bill tells you the diet. That short, deep cone is a seed-crushing tool, capable of splitting sunflower hulls and even small cherry pits. Across the year, roughly three quarters of a cardinal's diet is plant material: wild seeds, waste grain, and fruit including dogwood, sumac, wild grape, mulberry and hackberry.

The exception is nesting season. Adults take large numbers of insects from late spring through summer, and nestlings are fed an almost entirely insect diet, mostly caterpillars, beetles and grasshoppers. This is why a yard treated for insects supports fewer cardinal broods regardless of how full the feeder is, a point covered in pesticides, lawns and birds.

At the feeder, in rough order of preference:

The feeder setup cardinals actually use#

Cardinals weigh about 1.6 oz (45 g) and have a broad body and long tail. Balance matters more to them than to a chickadee.

• Platform or tray feeders are the best single choice. A platform feeder with a wide floor lets a cardinal stand, turn and crack seed at leisure.
• Hopper feeders work well if the ledge is at least 2 inches (5 cm) deep. A hopper feeder is the standard compromise for a mixed yard.
• Ground feeding suits them naturally. Cardinals forage on the ground a great deal, so a ground feeder or catch tray under the main station picks up both spilled seed and cardinals.
• Tube feeders are the weak option. A cardinal will cling awkwardly at a tube port for a few seconds, or use it only if you fit a wide bottom tray.

Hang or mount the feeder 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 m) up, within a short flight of shrubs, and keep it away from open lawn. Because cardinals feed in the dimmest light of the day, a feeder you can see from a window is worth siting on the east side of the house, where first light hits it. The full build-out is in how to attract cardinals.

Behavior worth knowing#

Dawn and dusk. Cardinals are usually the first bird at the feeder and reliably the last, feeding in light too poor for most songbirds. Their large eyes are the likely reason. If your feeder looks unvisited at midday, check it at 6 a.m.

Singing females. Unusually for North American songbirds, the female cardinal sings, often from the nest, and often in duet with the male. The song is a series of loud clear slurred whistles, commonly written as birdy-birdy-birdy or cheer-cheer-cheer. Both sexes give a sharp metallic chip year-round.

Mate feeding. In late winter and spring the male passes seed directly to the female, beak to beak. It looks like a kiss and is a standard part of pair bonding.

Fighting glass. From late winter into early summer, territorial males attack windows, car mirrors and hubcaps, sometimes for weeks. The bird sees a rival, not a reflection.

Nesting#

Pairs form in late winter and typically hold a territory of a few acres together. The female builds a cup nest of twigs, bark strips, grass and rootlets, usually 3 to 10 feet (1 to 3 m) up in a dense shrub, vine tangle or small conifer. Honeysuckle, brambles, hollies and arborvitae are all favorites.

Clutches are usually 2 to 5 eggs, grayish-white with brown speckling. The female incubates for about 12 to 13 days, both parents feed the young, and the chicks leave the nest around 9 to 11 days after hatching. Two broods a year is normal, three in the South.

Cardinals do not use nest boxes. Nothing will persuade them: they are open-cup nesters, so shrub planting is the only housing you can offer. They are also frequent hosts for the brown-headed cowbird, which lays in their nests.

Population and conservation#

Northern Cardinals are doing well. They are among the most abundant and widespread songbirds in eastern North America, their range has expanded steadily northward for more than a century, and continental trends have been stable or increasing. They carry no conservation designation of concern.

Their main hazards in a yard are ordinary ones: outdoor cats, which take a heavy toll on a bird that spends so much time low in shrubs and on the ground, and window collisions. Both are addressed in cats and birds.

Cardinals also mix into the flocks that gather at winter feeders, and dense feeder flocks are how diseases such as salmonellosis spread. A feeder cleaned every two weeks is basic housekeeping rather than a nicety, and the method is in how to clean a bird feeder.

A cardinal setup that works#

• A platform or wide-ledged hopper, 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 m) up, filled with black oil sunflower or safflower.
• A ground tray below it, since cardinals forage low by preference.
• Dense shrub cover within 15 feet (4.5 m), evergreen if you can manage it.
• Water year-round; cardinals use bird baths heavily and are easy to see there.
• Feeder full at first light, because the birds arrive before you do.