Following up on your Bird coverage — as a former resident of Brooklyn now living in Florida, and a bird lover, I was pleased to see the excellent photo of the Northern Cardinal by Heather Wolf featured in the Brooklyn Eagle’s “BirdWatch” series.
I remember a few years ago a co-worker came in to work one day very excited about a bird she had seen. She had already told me about her grandfather in Albania who was a serious bird lover, and her fond memories from childhood of her grandparents’ home being filled with the sounds of Albanian goldfinches and canaries.
She knew I liked photographing birds, and she said: “I saw this bird in the park yesterday, I’ve never seen one like that, it was so beautiful; it was completely bright red all over.” I smiled and told her it was the male cardinal.
A few months later, after seeing a red male cardinal fly through the courtyard where I live, I figured there might be Cardinals living nearby. I created a bird feeder, and soon, as I had hoped, a pair of cardinals appeared. Neither the male nor female cardinal would visit the feeder placed up on the fence, but would instead, as your Eagle notes describe, stay close together and near the ground, very cautiously and quietly approaching the birdseed I had spread over the concrete. What a treat!
