How Do You Identify The Cardinal When Backyard Winter Birding?
“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 visitor
