Northern Cardinal

A fairly large songbird with a long tail, a pointed crest and a short, very thick bill for cracking seeds. The male is red all over, brightest on the face and breast, with a black mask around his red-orange bill. The female is pale tan-brown with warm red in her wings, tail and crest, and the same red-orange bill. Cardinals often sit hunched, with the tail pointing down.

A cardinal is 8.3 to 9.1 in (21 to 23 cm) long, with a wingspan of 9.8 to 12.2 in (25 to 31 cm), and weighs 1.5 to 1.7 oz (42 to 48 g): slightly smaller than an American Robin.¹ Males average a little larger than females, but their sizes overlap.

The red comes from food. Cardinals build it from carotenoid pigments they eat and lay it down as new feathers grow in the late-summer molt, and fruit is a rich source: in an Ohio study, wild grapes and other fruit made up more than half of what males ate while molting.² The black mask is a different pigment, melanin, and does not depend on diet.

Males and females are easy to tell apart: a red male, a tan female. A female's mask varies from nearly as dark as a male's to small and grayish, many have a few red feathers on the face and upper breast, and the undersides of her wings are orange-red. More: female cardinals and how to tell male from female.

Young cardinals look like dull females with a dark gray to black bill, a shorter crest and loose, fluffy feathers. Young males and females look alike at first. Over late summer and fall the young males show patches of red as they molt, and the bill reaches its adult color 65 to 80 days after hatching. More: juvenile cardinals and baby cardinals.

Fresh feathers on a male's back and neck have gray-olive tips in the fall. They wear off over the winter, so males look their brightest in late winter and spring.

Adults replace all their feathers once a year, mainly from July to October. Every so often a cardinal loses most or all of its head feathers at once and shows dark bare skin. The cause is usually unknown; the skin looks normal, and the feathers grow back at the next molt. In a banding study in Tennessee, 7 of 1,621 cardinals caught had missing head feathers.³

Rarely, a cardinal is yellow instead of red. A yellow male that was studied had only yellow pigments in its feathers, which suggests it lacked the enzymes that turn yellow pigments red.⁴

Across most of its range nothing else has red plumage, a crest and a thick orange-red bill together: Audubon calls the male the only red bird with a crest.⁵

In the Southwest and Mexico, look out for the Pyrrhuloxia, a close relative. It is grayer than a female cardinal, and its short, stubby bill is yellow with a strongly curved top edge. Males have red on the face and down the middle of the belly.

Red male tanagers have no crest and no black mask. A male Scarlet Tanager has black wings and tail; a male Summer Tanager is red all over with a pale bill. Both tanagers are smaller, keep to the tops of trees and migrate, so neither is around in winter.

Both males and females sing: loud, clear, whistled phrases repeated in a series, often written as what-cheer, cheer, cheer or birdie, birdie, birdie, sometimes ending in a low, dry chirr. Many songs last 2 to 5 seconds.

The call you will hear most is a sharp, metallic chip, given in alarm, in squabbles at feeders and before going to roost. Learn it, and you can find cardinals hidden in a thicket.

Males sing in every month, most from February to September and least in November and December. Females sing less, often from the nest.

Songs are learned, so neighbors share most of their songs and each area has its own dialect. A female's song from the nest seems to tell her mate when to bring food: in a Wisconsin study, males came to the nest 80% of the time when the female answered their chips with song, and 45% of the time when she stayed silent.⁶

Wherever there are dense shrubs and small trees: yards, parks, towns, woodland edges, hedgerows, overgrown fields and thickets by water, and mesquite and desert scrub in the Southwest. Cardinals need thick cover to nest in and a few high perches to sing from.

They live across the eastern and central US and southeastern Canada, west to the Great Plains, and in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and south through Mexico to northern Guatemala and Belize. People introduced them to Hawaii and the Los Angeles area, and they have lived on Bermuda since at least the early 1800s. West of the Great Plains, away from the desert Southwest, they are mostly absent. More: where cardinals live and cardinals in Hawaii.

Cardinals have been spreading north since at least the mid-1800s, helped by milder winters, the shrubby edges people create and bird feeders. Birds of the World notes that in New York they were found in only 2 counties around 1900, and in 59 of the state's 62 counties by 1970.

No. Cardinals live in the same area all year. Nearly 90% of banded cardinals that were later found dead were within the same small block of latitude and longitude where they had been banded, with no sign of a seasonal direction.⁷ Young birds move a mile or two from where they hatched, and adults may wander more widely in winter to find food. More: cardinals in winter.

Watch feeders and the edges of thickets around dawn and dusk, when cardinals visit most. Away from yards, listen for the metallic chip; in winter, look for small groups feeding on the ground near cover.

Mostly seeds and fruit, plus insects. In a classic study of 498 stomachs, plants made up about 71% of the year's diet and animals 29%.⁸ The plant share climbs to about 88% in winter. Nestlings are different: their parents feed them almost nothing but insects.³

Wild foods include weed and grass seeds, wild grapes, dogwood, mulberry, sumac, blackberry and hackberry; beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars and cicadas; and spiders and snails. In spring cardinals feed on the ground for seeds, then move up into trees and shrubs for buds and caterpillars once the leaves open. More: what cardinals eat.

Black-oil sunflower seed is the favorite. In an 18-month study of 22 kinds of seed at feeders in Maryland, sunflower came out on top, and black-oil was the best liked of the sunflowers.⁹ Project FeederWatch also lists hulled sunflower, safflower, cracked corn, millet, milo and peanut hearts for cardinals, offered on the ground, on a platform, or in a large hopper or tube feeder.¹⁰

Cardinals do eat safflower, but in a feeder test with no other cardinals around, they chose sunflower over it.¹¹ Feeders near dense shrubs suit them: cardinals use feeders in the open less when a hawk is about.

The female builds a cup of twigs, leaves, grapevine bark and grass, wedged into a fork in a dense shrub, small tree or vine tangle, 1 to 15 ft up. She lays 2 to 5 eggs, usually 2 or 3, grayish to greenish white with brown speckles, and incubates them alone for 11 to 13 days. Both parents feed the chicks, which leave the nest at 7 to 13 days old, most often at 9 or 10.¹²

First eggs are laid in March or April, and nesting runs into late summer. Pairs try again and again, because about 70% of nests are lost to predators: a pair may start 8 to 10 nests in a season, though seldom more than 2 or 3 succeed.³

Cardinals do not use nest boxes; dense shrubs and vine tangles are the way to help them.¹³ An active nest is protected: under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act it is illegal to destroy a nest with eggs or young in it.¹⁴ More: cardinal nesting and eggs and baby cardinals.

Cardinals hop on the ground and through bushes and make short, undulating flights between cover. The crest goes up when a bird is excited and lies flatter when it is relaxed.

Both sexes defend a territory in the breeding season, about 0.5 to 6.4 acres (0.21 to 2.6 ha), with song, chases and, rarely, fights that last a few seconds. Boundary defense stops in late summer and starts again between January and March.

That drive explains the cardinal that fights your window. In spring and early summer, males and females attack their own reflection in windows and car mirrors, sometimes for hours, day after day. It is usually harmless to the bird. To stop it, remove the reflection from the outside of the glass, with a sheet, an exterior screen or decals, and fold car mirrors in.¹⁵ More: are cardinals territorial?

Do cardinals mate for life? Often for more than one season, but not always. Pairs can stay together through the winter, yet in an Ohio study 2 of 10 banded pairs split up between seasons, and All About Birds puts it at up to 20% of pairs.¹² Males feed their mates beak to beak during courtship and while she sits on the eggs. DNA studies found that 9 to 35% of nestlings were fathered by a male other than the mate.³

In fall and winter cardinals gather in loose flocks, usually a dozen to several dozen birds and occasionally more than 100, and roost together in thickets and conifers. The flocks break up between January and March as pairs claim territories. More: what a group of cardinals is called.

Most cardinals live only a few years. Between half and three-quarters of adults survive from one year to the next: estimates range from 50.5% to 78.3% across 14 study sites in Ohio. In a 12-year banding study in Tennessee, many cardinals were last found at 2 to 3 years old, and 30 of 1,621 were known to have lived 3 to 6 years.³

Domestic cats, Cooper's Hawks, shrikes and owls take adults. Snakes, Blue Jays, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and grackles raid nests, and Brown-headed Cowbirds lay their eggs in cardinal nests. Some cardinals die hitting windows.

The oldest known wild cardinal was a female at least 15 years and 9 months old, found in Pennsylvania.¹ The oldest known male was at least 13 years and 2 months old.

The Northern Cardinal is of Least Concern, with a stable population.¹⁶ Partners in Flight estimates about 130 million birds.¹² On the North American Breeding Bird Survey, numbers in the US and Canada rose by an estimated 17% between 1970 and 2014. They are increasing in the north, but falling slightly in the coastal plain of the Southeast and in peninsular Florida.

Cardinals have done well alongside people: suburbs, farmland and feeders gave them more nesting cover and winter food. Like other native songbirds, they are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.