Just outside my home-office window, I noticed a bird’s nest about 4 feet high in some leafless shrubbery on a cold, winter’s day. I had not seen the nest in summer when it was hidden by green ...

Walking along a river trail recently, some birding friends and I stopped to stare in astonishment at an unusual sight, a hummingbird flitting near the base of a big oak. Almost at ground level, she ...

Q: I'm enjoying seeing a male and female cardinal at my feeders and sitting in a nearby tree together. Are they a couple? A: Cardinal pairs don't separate after nesting season, as many songbirds do.

Spring sometimes motivates me to get up at an hour that seems totally unreasonable at any other time of year. And so, when I stepped outside at 5 a.m., I was surprised to be greeted by the ...

Once the female is incubating the eggs, she will sing from the nest in response to the male’s song. Cardinals aren’t the only female birds that sing. Others include rose-breasted grosbeaks and ...

Could you build a simple, cup-shaped bird nest, like that of a Northern cardinal, strong enough to withstand the vicissitudes of spring weather and hold three to five nestlings? I accepted that ...

Feb 10, 2018 Feb 10, 2018 Updated Dec 28, 2022 One common backyard bird that may be taken for granted also has romantic attributes worthy of Valentine’s Day. In the brown bleakness of mid-winter, the ...

As you begin Valentine’s Day, listen for the cheery song of the northern cardinal. The crimson-colored male bespeaks sweetheart’s day like no other bird, and its courtship with the female cardinal is ...

Both male and female birds use traits like plumage brightness to size each other up, but a new study on Northern Cardinals shows that the meanings of female birds’ markings may vary from one place to ...

Editor's note: Jamie Hill was misidentified in a previous version of this story. Longtime birder Jamie Hill of Waterford knew he'd come across something rare when he saw the northern cardinal that ...