Video: How to Identify the Cardinal when Backyard Winter Birding

Learn how to identify a Cardinal when backyard birding in winter in this free bird watching video

Video Transcript

Hello, welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen, director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society Important Bird Areas Program and we’re here this afternoon at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshville, Massachusetts. Next we’re going to talk about backyard birding, a place where everybody has an opportunity to get involved and where many people's interest in birding first begins. The Northern Cardinal is a breed that hardly needs any introduction. The males are bright red with a black face and a very distinctive crest, the females are more subtly colored sort of a pinkish brown but with a red veal and the same crest enjoyed by the male. The Cardinal like the Tufted Titmouse that we’ve previously described is a species that only relatively recently expended its range northward into New England. Not starting to nest until sometime in the 1960’s, today the northern cardinal and the tufted titmouse both are among our most frequent backyard birds and our regular visitors at feeders. Cardinals unlike the chickadees and the tufted titmice however, often times prefer to take their food off the ground and unlike many species they often will linger very, very late in the afternoon, often being amongst the latest birds to come to the feeder and sometimes one of the first ones to appear at first light in the morning. So Cardinals are always welcomed, they readily nest in shrubbery around houses, they have a loud cheery call and certainly brighten a winter landscape when there’s snow on the ground.

How to Identify the Cardinal when Backyard Winter Birding

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