Cardinal Window Woes

While our homestead may host a small flock of chickadees and titmice, we’ve never had more than one mating pair of cardinals. The resident male cardinal has consistently been intolerant of having any other guy of his species hang around. For a few years after we moved here the male was devilishly irritating; he kept attacking his own image in our windows, assuming it was his dreaded foe. Some days he’d land on a sill and bash away at himself for an hour or two. When that hour or two was at five in the morning, I was ready to throttle him.

I began to think that he’d addled his brain, turning it to mush, in his compulsive assaults that seemed to grow ever longer. I read with great trepidation that cardinals could live more than 20 years. That longevity, however, was achieved by a bird in captivity. Wild songbirds are lucky to live to an age of five. It made me wonder how old this guy was. How many more years would he pester us? Would he break the wild record and live with us for many more years? And would his replacement just carry on the tradition? I found my fondness for cardinals waning.

I tried taping pictures of hawks, owls, and other birds of prey to the inside of the windows, in a futile attempt to intimidate him. The fierce photos didn’t faze him. He pecked in their faces. I finally hit on the idea of tacking strips of chicken wire over some windows—just to keep him from reaching the glass. After attacking the wire a few times, he finally gave up.

A related problem had been disturbing us during that period: birds flying headlong into the windows and either becoming stunned or killed by breaking their neck. When a bird flies toward a window it sees the reflection of the sky behind it, not realizing it’s about to meet hard glass. We coddled a few birds until they regained consciousness, but it was heartbreaking to hold a bird whose life ebbed away.

After several failed experiments (like my earlier taping up of raptor photos) I hit upon an idea: fasten small tree branches to the outside of the window, so a bird perceives a tree, not open sky. It even allowed me to remove the ugly chicken wire, as the cardinal had by now apparently changed his ways. Window collisions dropped drastically, and cardinal peckings continued to be lacking.

Mom and pop cardinal even eventually became adapted to our presence—if not exactly tame. Once too shy to come to the feeder, they’ve now grown to be regular customers. They are usually the first at dawn and the last at dusk. It’s quite a sight, when light levels are diminishing, to see the brilliant red of the male fly to the feeder and sit there for several minutes, cracking sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells.

Just recently I was treated to the sight of the father feeding one of his fledged offspring, who’d scarcely acquired flying skills. Dad would pick up a seed, discard the shell, and fly to a tree. The youngster would immediately and awkwardly fly to him and get its reward: the seed stuffed into his gaping bill. The father always flew to a different spot, making his baby fly to him. It seemed to be both feeding and flying practice.

A couple of days later we heard a crash against the window and we once again sickeningly looked at each other, knowing this was a hard impact. I went out to find an immature cardinal lying on the ground, bleeding from its bill, quickly expiring. I winced yet one more time at a death that we had caused, while in vain trying to prevent it. Casing the situation out, I guessed that the inexperienced bird had tried to aim between two twigs on the branch that was tacked to the window, but failed.

I was greatly relieved later that day, when I saw the father feeding another of his offspring. I apologized to him for placing a window in his baby’s way and wished him success in his current parental investment. Could he also pass on the lesson of avoiding those branches on the windows?