Everyone seems to love cardinals. When I had a wild bird store (not selling wild birds, but rather selling all the stuff to attract them), we sold a lot of other bird stuff. We had clothing, suncatchers, coffee mugs, and lots of other stuff that bird pictures could be placed on. Cardinals and hummingbirds sold the best, followed by chickadees, goldfinches, and bluebirds.
Cardinals are seed-eaters most of the time. They raise their young by feeding them mostly insects. In the winter, we attract them to our bird feeders using sunflower seeds, safflower seeds, and maybe peanuts or cracked corn.
They will eat suet if it is in a feeder available to them. To prevent starlings from eating all the suet in a few hours, we often hang the suet upside down so woodpeckers and chickadees can get it but not the starlings. Cardinals can’t get it in the upside-down feeder either.
The best feeders for cardinals have long perches. Many tube feeders have short perches to keep blackbirds off, but they are not the best fit for cardinals either. A tray under the tube feeder will help. Hopper-style feeders with wide perches are great for cardinals.
To attract them the rest of the year, we plant a diverse landscape that has different kinds of plants that will attract different kinds of insects.
As for water, they are attracted to moving water more than still water. When I turn my waterfalls back on in my backyard pond after having the pond off for cleaning, the birds come for a bath within minutes. But birds will use a birdbath if that is what is available.
Birds do take baths in the winter. They maintain waterproof feathers with oil from a gland near their tail. Oil attracts dirt, and dirt attracts water, so the birds need to wash off the dirty, oily feathers and re-oil their feathers with clean oil. Birdbath de-icers are not expensive and don’t use much electricity.
Cardinals are not migratory. They need shelter from winter weather, and they need shelter to build a nest. Evergreens and dense shrubbery that isn’t pruned into tiny balls will help provide shelter year-round.
If you were bright red and afraid of predators, you might be a bit shy, just like cardinals. They use landscaping to hide and to scout out an open area before entering it. They will often sit in the shrubs watching the feeders before they fly out into the open to sit on a feeder. Placing the feeders near shrubs helps as long as it is far enough away that squirrels and cats can’t use the shrubs to get to the feeders. Cardinals often come to feeders early in the morning and late in the afternoon when they feel safer. And to that point, your cardinals may be coming to your yard more often than you think. You might want to try one of the bird feeders with a built-in camera so you can see what was at the feeder when you weren’t looking.
Since they aren’t migratory, once you provide the proper food, water, and shelter, they will stay around. And if you are not in the cardinal’s normal range, you won’t get them. They have been expanding their range to the north for decades. They can be found from Maine across the Great Lakes into Minnesota, then down the Great Plains into Mexico and Central America. And since people are never satisfied with nature, they have been released into Bermuda, southern California, and Hawaii. The desert southwest has the “almost cardinal” with the hard-to-pronounce name Pyrrhuloxia.
