Cardinal facts
Her feathers blend nicely with the foliage, but that orange beak is a dead giveaway among the pink roses.
At first I thought I'd run across another crazed animal in the garden. Who ever heard of a bird nesting in August? But turns out my ignorance was showing.
After doing a bit of research I discovered that Illinois' state birds actually hatch two sets of fledglings every year - one in spring and another in late summer (although August is pushing it a bit).
I also discovered that cardinals are monogamous. And that the courting process begins with the male showing off his handsome physique and then taking the female something good to eat. (Not so different from dancing and dinner...)
Chicks hatch in just 11 to 13 days (vastly different than nine months!) and are ready to leave the nest in one to two weeks. (Our daughter was 25.)
While the female is incubating the eggs, the male brings her food (think pickles and ice cream) and sometimes he'll even sit on the eggs himself. (Although that fine physique was nowhere to be seen the other night when we were getting two inches of driving rain...) Both parents care for their offspring once they hatch. (Much better than gulls who've been known to eat their young.)
A few other cardinal facts:
The oldest wild cardinal banded by researchers lived at least 15 years and 9 months.
Male and female cardinals use "chip" calls to keep contact with their mate and to signal alarm.
Cardinals eat weed and sunflower seeds, grains, fruits and insects such as boll weevils, cutworms, and caterpillars.
Cardinals have actually become more common over the past 200 years, with approximately 100,000,000 of them currently living worldwide.
2 Comments:
Cardinals remind me of a pet bird we once had as kids...
While playing outside, my sister discovered a cockatiel pecking at some grass seed under a neighbor's porch. She managed to grab him and happily walked him home to my parents' surprise. We already owned a couple of parakeets, and had a spare cage to house him in.
No owner came to claim him, so we named him "Punkin". He was a tame and friendly bird, and settled into his new home quickly.
Along with the usual parrot-like screeches and chirps you'd expect from a cockatiel, he would occasionally break into a beautiful, whistling song...the cardinal's!
Maybe Punkin identified with the crest of feathers they each sported on their heads, or maybe they shared an affinity for sunflower seeds. In either case, Punkin was a bird with an identity crisis.
Punkin passed away several years ago, but every time I hear a cardinal, I think of our happy little bird.
Thanks, KC. Your memory has prompted one of my own…
As a kid, we had a parakeet named Pepe. My brother and I tried our best to get him to say, "Pretty bird!" We must have driven our mother nuts as we repeated that phrase over and over, day in and day out. We kind of gave up, though, after the poor bird lost all his feathers and never grew them back. Somehow the message and the messenger would just have been too incongruous! (I've since learned that parakeets molt when they get stressed. Living with two kids, a cat and a dog must have been too much for Pepe...)
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