"Principal principal" would be a fair translation of the Linnean scientific name for this most favorite of American birds, though so ubiquitous are its representations, mostly of the male, crest up-on Christmas cards, party napkins, banners and flags flapping from little front door poles all over suburbia-that cardinalis seems as if it ought to mean "red." After all, one of the bird's many historical names, one my father used, is "red bird." "Cardinal red" has entered the dictionary as a color, though it derives its definition not from the bird but, as the bird, from the scarlet cassock and tufted hat of Roman Catholic prelates. Birder Peter Cashwell wondered, as others have, how this Protestant country, so much more so at the time it was naming birds, could have turned to the Roman church at its most pompous to name a bird now so democratic that it's the favorite visitor to backyard feeders all over its North American range. Cashwell discovered that the name cardinal goes back to 16th century conquistadors and explorers, the first Europeans to record its red flash in their journals. Mystery solved. A bird whose color and very tuft reminded its namers of their patrons.
Cardinalis, from the noun cardo, hinge. A cardinal virtue (there are four in scholastic philosophy: prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude), so important that others hang from it, swing, as on a hinge; cardinal points of the compass: north, south, east, west-the principal ones.
Founding birder John James Audubon writes of the cardinal, which he painted in Louisiana in 1822, that "in richness of plumage, elegance of motion, and strength of song, this species surpasses all of its kindred in the United States." The last of these three, "strength of song" is what especially captures my attention these days. Having recently moved back into cardinal habitat from North Dakota, where I saw only two cardinals in more than three decades-thought I heard one briefly once but, scrambling around the neighborhood in pursuit, never confirmed it-I was delighted to hear its unmistakable call showering down on us in Saint Paul even as we were unloading a preliminary U-Haul of furniture one steamy Labor Day weekend afternoon. It sang and sang. It sounded as if there may have been several, restoring an important, forgotten portion of my western Pennsylvania childhood soundscape, a welcome, it seemed, to our new home. An exile was ending.
Bird books, while acknowledging at least 28 variations in that song, miss, or discreetly avoid, something essential in its quality, its often distinctively racy character. Many refer to the cardinal's song as clear, transcribing it variously as "birdy, birdy, birdy," "what cheer, what cheer, what cheer," "whoit, whoit," even, enigmatically, "Q!, Q!, Q!" One learns that females sing while on the nest; that they counter sing with males (cardinals mate for life) in what Cornell's renowned ornithology center terms "duetting." An early writer simply surrenders: "Its notes are too numerous to transcribe, but are nearly all loud and clear." But nowhere have I found a description that fully expresses the bold, flirty, full-bodied, wolf whistle quality of its main call that comes through loud and clear to me. Cheer indeed. It literally turns heads.
One day, on the patio of a nearby coffee shop, deep in John Hoerr's And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry, I had trouble concentrating, so insistent were the "what cheer, what cheer, what cheer" notes raining down over the whole block. It was early spring, a day when tentative, pale green unfurlings were verging into fuller expression. "Who's he whistling at?" a young man said to his male friend at a nearby table, both of them laughing with the unmistakable, edgy joy of sexual innuendo. They craned their heads up; I joined them; finally we spotted the red bird, high on a wire threading the fuzzy, early-green blur of trees framing the patio.
My younger brother Joe loves the cardinal's song. He used to regularly turn Mr. Cordic's alcohol-muddled head when he passed beneath the sheltering canopy of Norway maples outside our Donora home. Joe had mastered the call, especially its distinctive, two-note, whistling glissando, and would crouch on our little attic balcony overlooking Castner Avenue, doubly hidden (maples and roof), and whistle down his "what cheers" on unsuspecting pedestrians. Mr. Cordic, a retired Croat coal miner who made predictable rounds at Orient's Bar up the street, became his favorite target. "It drove him crazy," Joe boasts now. "He never figured out where it was coming from. I'd whistle; he'd stop and look around, start up again. I'd wait a few steps and whistle again. He'd stop. `Where's that bird?' he'd say, `Where's that fucking bird?'" A specialty steel welder in Connecticut now, Joe, nicknamed "Tweety Bird" by a coworker, still tricks new employees. Perching high in some corner of the big power plant in Devon, on lunch or coffee break, he'll whistle his trademark sound, befuddling "the new guy" below, searching vainly for a phantom cardinal.
The cardinal, as bird, first dived deep into my subconscious in the seminary when one bit me, a female I was holding, cupped under the palm of my right hand, its head poking between the index and middle fingers, the way Father Roch taught us to carry all the birds we trapped for banding for our Cardinal Bird Club, an affiliate of the of Eastern Bird Banding Association. I was carrying it back from the trap in the woods, its feathery soft, warm, throbbing-with-fear body filling both my hand and spirit, when I felt a sharp pain on the tip of my index finger. The cardinal's thick, red, seed-cracking bill had clamped on and would not let go; I had to flick its beak away repeatedly with my left hand, discovering a wide, V shaped red crease on my finger when she finally quit biting.
Never an easy sleeper, I had a particularly difficult time falling asleep the night I banded that only cardinal I ever caught. Something about holding so beautiful and big a bird after the varieties of sparrows, the juncos and chickadees I had already banded, stirred me and I could not quiet the turbulence. Churning around in my austere little alcove cot while everyone else slept, I kept seeing cardinals in my mind's eye, feeling again the bite of the one I'd banded, conjuring endless loops of possible developments: maybe my pretty bird would be trapped elsewhere, my own modest contribution to cardinal lore (at fifteen, I did not know that cardinals stray and wander, but do not migrate); maybe I would trap and get to band the more dramatically scarlet male; other, more beautiful, rarer birds might be in my future. Lights Out was around 9:00 pm; we arose at 5:30, but it was way past midnight before I relaxed into sleep. The female cardinal had burst forth from my hand hours earlier, an animate blur of energy, banded but free, but it had imprinted me more deeply than its nip on my finger, igniting in me a sense of a larger, more complicated and interesting world.
© 2005 by James McKenzie.