3 March 2014. Burlington, Ontario. It’s perhaps precipitate of me to declare my bird of the day before breakfast, but I’ll chance it. Monday is garbage day here, we need to get the blue box, the green bin and the non-recyclables out to the road-side early, otherwise well, you know. And it was while doing just that, in that first hour of the day, that I saw and heard a male Northern Cardinal in full song, my Bird of the Day.
It’s a bright full-sun March morning although still January cold. The cardinal was, and still is as I write, singing loudly from the top of a small ash tree that marks the boundary of a neighbour’s back yard. The cardinal’s song, to those not familiar with it, is a forceful series of whistles; first an increasingly assertive series of three or four notes: feeta-feeta-feeta-feet, followed by a couple of long exhalations: tewww tewww. It’s a hallmark song of suburban North America and heard in February or March, a sign of spring approaching.
