Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis)
Description: This common backyard bird is quite large with a long tail and a thick noticable crest on its head. A male cardinal contains a bright red color all over its body with a slightly red bill and a black face surrounding this bill. The females are overall brown, but they do contain red on their wings, crest, and tail. Again the female has a black face around its slightly red bill.
Habitat: These birds can be found anywhere in inhabited places like parks, backyards, woodlots, and forests. With the expansion of towns, the cardinal finds more and more places to live.
Diet: Their main diet consists of furits and seeds and also insects. They feed thier nestlings mainly insects as well. The common fruits among these birds are wild graoes, grass, mulberry, blackberry, sumac, corn, and buckwheat. Although they will eat almost any kind of birdseed they prefer sunflower seeds. The insects that they consume include crickets, flies, centipedes, spiders, butterflies, moths, and beetles.
Behaviors:
Miscellaneous:
Habitat: These birds can be found anywhere in inhabited places like parks, backyards, woodlots, and forests. With the expansion of towns, the cardinal finds more and more places to live.
Diet: Their main diet consists of furits and seeds and also insects. They feed thier nestlings mainly insects as well. The common fruits among these birds are wild graoes, grass, mulberry, blackberry, sumac, corn, and buckwheat. Although they will eat almost any kind of birdseed they prefer sunflower seeds. The insects that they consume include crickets, flies, centipedes, spiders, butterflies, moths, and beetles.
Behaviors:
- When they sing, they will perch on a high branch of of a tree yet are still noticable because of their bright color red
- They crest on the top of their heat can be raised and lowered. When the bird becomes angry, the crest is raised and when resting, the crest is almost always lowered.
- Foraging for food is sometimes done with sparrows or dark eyed juncos
- During their breeding season, these birds are found mainly in pairs moving around but in the winter they are seen in groups. These pairs that are seen may stay together during these winter flocks but some do seperate into different flocks.
- Before actually building the nest, a femal Cardinal will visit the sites that she is looking at multiple times until she finds a place that she wants to build her nest. The male cardinal will follow along the female while she is looking for a place to nest.
- The female is able to crush twigs and turn the twigs around her body so that she can bend them. This makes a cup shaped nest which has four layers. The first layer is made of coarse twigs and even sometimes trash. It is covered with leaves for a matting then lined with grass, stems, and pine needles.
Miscellaneous:
- The Northern Cardinal is the state bird of seven states