Cardinals are one of the most iconic birds in North America, especially east of the Rockies. Their sound, striking color and the fact that they’re a frequent residential visitor has gained our affection over the decades.
As your love for northern cardinals has grown, you might wonder how you could get a pair to nest in your yard.
There are several things you can do to encourage cardinals to nest in your yard. Providing fresh water, food, plants for nesting sites and avoiding things that don’t work like birdhouses are just a few ways to encourage northern cardinals to nest near you.
If you’ve found cardinals nesting in your yard, the next important thing is being a good bird host by protecting them and not interfering too much.
In this article, we’ll provide 10 tips to help you attract a nesting pair of cardinals to your yard.
1. Are cardinals even in your range?
The first tip for getting cardinals to nest near you is to make sure you even have them in your range.
The range of a northern cardinal covers southeastern Canada, the US states east of the Rocky Mountains, and goes as far south as Mexico and parts of Central America. Cardinals are year-round residents in their range, and do not migrate.
What this means is that if you live in Arizona or Idaho or west of the Rockies, you won’t have cardinals around you to begin with, except for special circumstances.
However, if you live east of the Rockies, then carry on to the next tips because you have cardinals in your state.
2. Understand their territory
During the breeding season, cardinals enforce their territory, guarding it from other cardinals. It’s their way of protecting vital resources.
There is some debate about the size of a northern cardinal’s breeding territory, but the average consensus is a territory as small as an acre or as big as 10 acres. Resource availability, habitat type and habitat properties can influence this.
If you live in a residential area with houses very close together, understanding territory is important because if there is one cardinal nesting within two or three acres of your home, it might be more challenging to get a cardinal to nest at your home due to competition.
However, if you develop your yard into more of a cardinal nesting habitat, you might be able to persuade that one residential cardinal to come to your yard rather than your neighbor’s. Or, if there is enough resources due to habitat quality, a competing cardinal might be less aggressive in defending his territory, allowing you to also host a cardinal pair.
3. Get cardinals to nest in your yard by first attracting them
Your first step to getting cardinals to nest in your yard is to attract them to your yard in the first place.
Fortunately, cardinals are one of many bird species that are adapted to live near humans, and it’s fairly easy to attract them.
Some quick tips to attract cardinals to your yard is to provide black oil sunflower seed in feeders, use feeders that are easy for cardinals to use like platform feeders and hopper feeders, provide a clean bird bath, and create more of a cardinal habitat in your yard.
We have a resource with more than 20 tips to help you attract cardinals to your yard, so if you want more information, just check it out.
4. Create a cardinal nesting habitat
We’ve mentioned that habitat is so important. While cardinals are perfectly happy in yards for feeding grounds, choosing a nesting ground is a different story.
When it comes to northern cardinal nesting habitats, yards with bushes, hedges, shrubs, trees and access to food and water are ideal residential nesting habitats. Sparse lawns with grass and little to no other vegetation will not provide cardinals the coverage and security needed to nest.
Cardinals nest in trees and bushes. They tend to like dense foliage that conceals them or tall bushes that may protect them from some threats or give them better surveillance.
If you have a yard that is mostly a lawn with little else, consider adding some bushes that will have more dense coverage. Junipers and arbor vitae are good starts. Holly trees and berry trees are also good options.
What you’re looking for is plants that will be thickly covered and have some height to them. Cardinals can nest as low as 1 foot from the ground, or as high as 15 feet – so offering them options is very helpful.
We also recommend you especially look for evergreen plants. This ensures there is always foliage so that cardinals starting a nest in the early spring have options to keep themselves hidden.
In our experience, we’ve found cardinals picked a deciduous bush (not evergreen) only one out of four times.
Aside from nesting spots, ensuring you provide access to fresh water and food will also encourage them to nest.
Something really important to note: if you discover a cardinal nest near your feeding station, temporarily move your feeders to another area. Having food too close to the nest will encourage predation.
To add to all of this, planting plants that will naturally feed cardinals will also attract them. Native plants are your best choice because they also host native insects that feed birds, and they usually are not a toxic threat to native birds.
Native berry trees are great options. Try to pick multiple varieties, with some fruiting in the spring and summer, and others fruiting in the late fall and winter.
Berries and insects are very important to a cardinal’s diet and are especially important for nestling nutrition and health.
5. Know when to look out for cardinals – the nesting season
Being really observant can help you a lot when it comes to attracting certain birds. Often, you have been more successful than you realize, but birds are very good at hiding themselves.
When you start to learn their sounds, their patterns and behaviors, your other senses (besides sight) will help validate whether you’re indeed attracting the bird you hoped.
With this in mind, it’s important to know when the cardinal nesting season begins so you know when to listen and look out for them in your yard. It’s also helpful to understand this information from a scheduling perspective because you’ll know when to plan to do certain things to help encourage them to nest.
The cardinal nesting season begins in February and goes on through late August. This is the time where cardinals establish territories, build nests, incubate eggs, raise nestlings, and teach their immature offspring how to survive.
If you’re wanting to encourage cardinals to nest in your yard, then you want to pay special attention to when they start building their nests.
Cardinals can start building nests as early as late February, but weather plays a big role in this. During this period, cardinals start breaking from winter flocks; they will establish territories and bonds, inspect nesting sites and begin building their nests.
Some of this behavior starts to begin as early as January, when you start to hear males sing a little bit in the mornings and evenings.
Between February and May, you may get very lucky in the early mornings and hear a male and female cardinal duetting.
Depending on your region, cardinals can have about 2 broods per year during the nesting season. Usually, while the female cardinal incubates her second set of babies, the male cardinal is teaching his first round of offspring how to survive life outside the nest.
Another important thing to note in all of this is that cardinals don’t usually reuse their nests. And, in our experience, they will pick different nesting locations each time. Fortunately, when they pick a different site, it’s still usually within the same yard.
6. Know where northern cardinals nest
The choicest place for cardinals to nest is in thick, dense foliage. Sometimes they will also prefer a less dense option, but nest higher up. Height and concealment help protect them from predators.
Therefore, if you want to encourage cardinals to nest in your yard, you will want to make sure you have the type of vegetation in your yard that will attract them.
Something to keep in mind is that cardinals can start selecting nesting sites as early as late February or March. During this time, there aren’t a whole lot of leaves on trees. So individuals looking for coverage, will likely be more attracted to evergreen bushes and plants.
Evergreen holly, magnolia, junipers and arbor vitae are good options.
If you already have these, then you’re pretty well set. But if your yard is more of an open lawn with little to no bushes, consider adding these around your home. Additionally, it’s very important to look for native plants.
Native plants encourage beneficial insects, which further encourage birds to your yard, and berrying versions of these plants are usually not toxic to birds.
7. Avoid birdhouses and platforms
During Christmas, especially, you will find cards or depictions of winter scenes with the iconic cardinal. And many times, he is perched on a birdhouse, or even pictured going into a birdhouse. But the reality is cardinals don’t use birdhouses to roost or nest.
Cardinals are open nesters like robins, finches and blue jays. Open nesters do not use birdhouses, nest boxes or tree holes. Instead, they build their nests in bushes or on platforms in the open – exposed to the elements.
So, if you bought yourself a little birdhouse hoping a cardinal might use it to nest or sleep, it won’t happen.
That’s not to say there isn’t some outlier out there – though we’ve never even seen a report of that. Anything can certainly happen in the wild. But for their species, they are consistently known as open nesters.
Cardinals likely will not use nesting platforms either. We haven’t seen one report of luck with cardinals using a nesting platform.
If you’re not familiar with a nesting platform, this is more of an open box with a floor, back wall and sometimes a roof. It is mounted to trees, fence posts or under eaves of homes, and are sometimes used by certain birds like finches or the occasional barn swallow.
Don’t waste your money on artificial nesting means. While they help certain bird species, it will just be throwing money away when it comes to cardinals.
Instead, invest in making your yard a haven for nesting cardinals, and you will likely have success.
8. Make sure you have water
When it comes to hosting birds, many of us prioritize seed and forget birds need water too! Adding a birdbath to your yard can make a huge difference in both attracting cardinals to your yard in the first place and tempting them to nest in your yard.
When it comes to bird baths, the type you get is very important. Decorative glass or plastic birdbaths are not recommended because the surfaces are too slick for birds to cling to.
We’ve personally tested this with a beautiful glass bird bowl. While we did have a few birds come to drink occasionally, we did not get as many as we did with our textured ground bath.
We also noticed birds struggling to perch and stabilize themselves on the glass dishes.
We also tried a glossed fiberglass dish. Again, the surface was too slick for use.
Cement, terracotta, and textured bird baths are the way to go.
Even better, select bird baths with different depths. This allows other, smaller birds to comfortably bathe and drink.
Our favorite are textured ground baths. The Bird’s Choice bath* has been our longtime favorite after testing several, and it’s the one you see pictured above with the female cardinal.
Keep your bird baths clean! Part of being a good bird host is making sure you’re taking care of them. If we are to interfere with nature, we need to be almost like a shepherd, protecting and caring for our flocks.
Because birds are very social and feeders and bird baths are communal spaces, they quickly harbor and incubate bacteria and viruses.
It’s very important to keep the water fresh and the bird baths fairly clean. Sometimes, it’s a little hard to remove all the grime, but doing the best you can, and being diligent about it counts for a lot.
Bird baths at winter
We’ve mentioned a few times that cardinals, like many songbirds, get an early start to the nesting season. And in February and March, temperatures can be unpredictable.
Unexpected cold snaps can freeze your baths, preventing access to water.
This is why we also recommend birdbath heaters. It’s not just to attract nesting cardinals, but to also help the survival of all your native backyard birds. Winter is a very very difficult time for birds, so being a caring steward over your wildlife can make such a huge impact.
9. Do not cut or trim bushes and hedges later in the nesting season
Maybe you’re reading this in April and May, and we’ve got you thinking about your bushes and hedges. And maybe you thought to yourself, “That’s right. Mine are looking spindly and need a good trim.”
Avoid doing this late in the nesting season because you may inadvertently destroy a nest and harm nestlings or eggs.
Cardinals are so good at hiding themselves that you may not realize you even have a nest in the first place. Trimming during the nesting period, especially once things get really active is dangerous to your birds.
You’re likely safe to trim evergreen bushes up into mid March, unless you’re in very southern states. And you are safe to trim deciduous bushes as long as you’re able to clearly see what’s inside. Once deciduous bushes and trees become thick with foliage, a nest can get really camouflaged, and this is when you don’t want to trim anymore.
10. Keep nests a secret
With all these tips, maybe you’re wondering how do I even find a cardinal nest in my yard. We really hesitate to give that information out. Drawing attention to native bird nests can be very dangerous.
Curious kids and adults may stress birds out leading to abandonment. And too much interest in a given area may draw predators like snakes, squirrels and even other birds.
So, if you find a cardinal nest, or any native bird nest – in your yard or elsewhere, DO NOT GIVE OUT THE LOCATION.
With that in mind, one of the best ways to locate a cardinal nest is to watch your pair. Watch to see if they frequent a certain bush. Or if you happen to see them with leaves, grass or other material in their beak, watch to see where they fly to. A cardinal may become more alarmed as you get closer to the nest.
11. Don’t interfere with nests
Finally, do not interfere with the nest once you locate it. You don’t want to stress your birds out, or accidentally harm the nest. Once you know where it is, monitor behavior from a distance.
The most you will usually see is cardinals fly in, and fly out of a nesting bush, especially if they really concealed their nest. But even still, it can be really exciting. And as long as you see them being really active in the nesting area, you can be assured their young are surviving.
We will also add that interfering with active nests of native songbirds (active nests have eggs or nestlings within) is not legal. Usually nest box monitoring is permitted, however interference and handling of open cup nesters is forbidden.
Additionally, it is not legal to keep any material of a native bird. This includes live birds, dead birds, feathers, nests, eggs or taxidermy bodies.
Encouraging cardinals to nest in your yard can be a fun challenge and bring on a really incredible experience. However, if you do go down this road, you also have a responsibility to do what’s right by your birds. Protect them, treat them well, and be sure to protect all the native birds in your yard.
As you start to turn your yard into a thriving ecosystem, you will begin to develop a wildlife haven you can be proud of, where each native animal has a real ecological niche. Watching the interaction between animals and resources will teach you so much and connect you to nature in ways you never imagined.
References
Filliater, T. S., Breitwisch, R., & Nealen, P. M. (1994). Predation on Northern Cardinal nests: Does choice of nest site matter?. The Condor, 96(3), 761-768.
Nealen, P. M., & Breitwisch, R. (1997). Northern Cardinal sexes defend nests equally. The Wilson Bulletin, 269-278.
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