Cardinals are one of the few songbirds where the female sings as much as the male, pairs duet from the nest as a coordination call.
Their bright red is structural color produced by carotenoids in their diet. Birds eating poor diets fade to dull orange.
Cardinals don't migrate, and pairs maintain the same territory year-round, often for life.
Cardinals are confident feeder visitors and easy to attract with the right seed and a dense shrub layer for cover.
Black-oil sunflower seeds and safflower (which they love and squirrels mostly ignore). Tray and hopper feeders are best. They don't perch easily on small tube feeders.
Plant a multi-tier hedge or thicket for nesting and roosting: privet, honeysuckle (native), elderberry, holly, viburnum. Cardinals love being able to disappear into dense cover.
They build their own nest in dense shrubs 3–10 ft off the ground; an open-front shelf can occasionally be used in tucked-away spots, but the shrubs do most of the work.
Bird bath at ground or shrub level. Cardinals drink and bathe regularly, year-round.
Don't strip out 'messy' brush and old shrub borders, that's exactly the structure cardinals need.
A southeastern bird whose range has expanded steadily north over the last 100 years, helped by feeders. Now resident across the entire eastern half of North America.
Year-round residents from southern Maine through Florida and west to eastern South Dakota and Texas.
Now resident throughout, having pushed into states (Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska) where they were absent a century ago.
Common in southern Arizona and the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico and Texas.
Resident throughout the eastern half of the country south to Yucatán.
Dense shrub and edge habitat: hedgerows, suburban yards with mature shrubs, woodland edges, swampy thickets. They avoid open lawn and deep forest.
No entrance hole, no front wall, just a sheltered ledge. Includes drainage and the integrated mounting tab.
Shop the lineupYear-round resident across most of range. Pairs are highly territorial, one pair per ~1–2 acres of suitable habitat.