A Congregation of Cardinals

Sunday 1 February 2026

Some of the information they don’t put into the field guides.

Early in the past week we were clipped by the northern edge of a storm boiling up south of the border. No, not the Trump storm, but a cold one with freezing rain and snow. Consequently, we didn’t go out walking so much to see wildlife, we made sure the garden feeders were topped up in advance and sat in the warm with mugs of tea to enjoy the visitors coming to the garden. Visitors, of which there were many, included a considerable number of Cardinals - a very photogenic bird, even if they are common. So today, we will think about Cardinals - collectively, and not inappropriately, known as a Congregation of Cardinals.

Henry David Thoreau: ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’

Cardinals, common as they are, are a bit special for J and I. We immigrated to Quebec/Canada in March of 1998 and about six weeks later moved into the house we still live in. It had lots of lumpy grass and some sparse flower borders … somewhat to be expected at the end of a Quebec winter. In the lawn was a leaning wooden post with a decrepit wooden bird feeder on it. I think the evening of the first day one of us must have put some bread crusts out there. Coming to an exciting new country we had decided to explore and not fuss with gardening (we had left a large, productive garden in England) or to give more than a passing nod to wildlife … but there I was on the morning of day two in the house, standing in front of the kitchen window filling a kettle to make tea, when I saw this bright scarlet bird land on the feeder. Well, common or not here, I can tell you England has nothing like that red and I just knew that I had to find out all about this magical neighbour. The rest, as they say, is history. We have much to thank that first welcoming Cardinal for.

A pair of Cardinals separately photographed in the garden and brought together by the magic of some electronic creativity.

The Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) first entered formal scientific literature with Carl Linnaeus’s description in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae (1758). Linnaeus gave the species its binomial name and placed it among the “Cardinal‑birds,” establishing the taxonomic baseline that is still used today.

A few years earlier, the bird had already been noted by naturalists and illustrators, most notably Mark Catesby. In his multi‑volume work The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (published between 1729 and 1732), Catesby included a detailed illustration and description of the cardinal, which is often cited as the earliest known European observation of the species in a scientific context. However, Linnaeus’s 1758 entry is regarded as the first official scientific record.

A gathering of five female Cardinals

Pair of fledglings recently out of the nest

Literary Cardinals

Before getting down to the biology of Cardinals I was curious to get a feel for how such a well-known bird had inspired writers. Surprisingly, not a lot seems to be the answer, despite the birds general ubiquity. Thoreau, in his Walden, mentioned “The redbird, which is the only bird that sings in winter, whistles cheerily from the top of a tree” and then moved on to other topics - Redbird being a one-time common name for Cardinals. Mary Oliver (who?) deathlessly wrote “The red bird came all winter, firing up the landscape as nothing else could do.” And one Annie Dillard, more recently, wrote “A cardinal flashed through the trees like a burning leaf.” You get the gist of it. The great literary world of North America pretty well ignored these splendid birds other than for background colour. In some desperation, dear reader, I consulted “Lumo the Proton Purple Cat” (a Swiss privacy-focussed AI tool) and managed to scrape up “With a rare leaf for a roof in the rain, With a rare cap for his cardinal hood, The cardinal bird remains.” garnered from “The Cardinal Bird” by  Orrick Johns (Poetry Magazine, Jan 1931).

I retired, defeated by all this unoriginal and frankly tedious repetition.

Some Cardinal Biology

The first thing anybody notices is that the males are bright, bright red while the females are a more muted brown‑red with subtle streaks. Although the body shape and size of both genders is identical the color difference is such that often people think they are different species. I recall a technician in the lab where I worked coming into my office one day with a photo of a female Cardinal on her phone and asking what it was. I told her and she flat out didn’t believe me … “you are the bird expert around here, and you don’t know anything!” The next day I brought in a field guide and talked her through it until reluctantly she believed me. But this is a common misconception.

Cardinals did not appear in the north around Montreal where I live until a few decades ago but gradually they extended their range and are now everywhere.

In southern Quebec, where the first nest was found in 1965, the range is concentrated in the St. Lawrence Lowlands and southern Appalachians, a significant northward and eastward expansion since the mid-1980s

They are a resident, non-migratory species that survives northern winters by finding seeds, berries, and the occasional insect, to eat and, of course, and they frequent bird feeders heavily. They are territorial but we have at least three pairs that coexist in winter in our garden because of the food we provide and the shelter they find in our bushes and shrubs. Last winter and the one before our garden was host to a MOTUS bird telemetry tower placed there by a McGill U masters student studying urban Cardinals and she certainly got lots of pings from “our” birds. Away from gardens with feeders, Cardinals live in dense shrubby areas such as forest edges, overgrown fields, hedgerows, backyards, marshy thickets, regrowing forest, and similar. It is thought that the increasing size of suburbs with their gardens (and feeders) may have been a driver in the species spreading their territory northwards.

The northern limit of the breeding range has expanded northward since at least the mid-1800s, and especially over the last 100 years. Northward expansion is likely related to 3 primary factors: warmer climate, resulting in lesser snow depth and greater winter foraging opportunities; human encroachment into forested areas, increasing suitable edge habitat; and establishment of winter feeding stations, increasing food availability
(Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

Unlike many bird species the female Cardinals sing as much, if not more than the males - just different tunes. She may be giving the male information about when to bring food to the nest. A mated pair shares song phrases, but the female may sing a longer and slightly more complex song than the male.

Both males and females build the nest, with the female doing most of the final shaping and the male delivering the building materials. Nests are cup‑shaped, woven from grasses, twigs, and bark, and lined with soft materials like moss and animal hair. They’re often placed in dense shrubs or low branches to hide from predators.

Cornell’s website says: Northern Cardinals hop through low branches and forage on or near the ground. Cardinals commonly sing and preen from a high branch of a shrub. The distinctive crest can be raised and pointed when agitated or lowered and barely visible while resting. You typically see cardinals moving around in pairs during the breeding season, but in fall and winter they can form fairly large flocks of a dozen to several dozen birds. During foraging, young birds give way to adults and females tend to give way to males. Cardinals sometimes forage with other species, including Dark-eyed Juncos, White-throated Sparrows, other sparrow species, Tufted Titmice, and Goldfinches. They fly mostly just short distances between thickets while foraging. Pairs usually stay together throughout winter, but up to 20 percent of pairs split up by the next season.

Plumage: Depending on age, season and diet there can be variations in the colors of Cardinals … if you want to know more than you could have imagined about this characteristic then I refer you to:

https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/norcar/cur/appearance

Subspecies: Unsurprisingly in a bird with such a geographic spread, evolution has presented us with some eighteen subspecies. Subspecies are currently divided into two subspecies groups (cardinalis and carneus), separated on the basis of distinctive bill shape, crest feathers, and coloration. There is a lot of information about, and images of, these subspecies at:

https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/norcar/cur/systematics#geovar

Earliest Reference in Print

Subsequently, aided in my searches with Lumo (vide supra), I was led to an Australian website of the Biodiversity Heritage Library which contained some pages from Shaw, George Shaw’s (1792) “The Cardinal Grosbeak, Loxia cardinalis in “ The Naturalist’s Miscellany”. Cardinal Grosbeak being the name of the species 234 years ago. Seemingly this may be the earliest extant print reference to the bird:

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Time for a refreshed bit of branding …

”How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer.” - Samwise Gamgee;