A Northern Cardinal is Marking his Territory!

I have two pairs of cardinals that live in my backyard and I have seen them there all semester. Both pairs are very active and I always see them paired up. I will often see the males chasing each other back and forth across my yard. I am assuming that one pair lives in the bushes on the right side of my yard and the others live on the left. When I went out to the backyard one of the cardinals immediately started singing, I’m assuming to defend his territory. I could see him perched up on the higher branches of the evergreen bushes right above me.
I think that the cardinal is defending prime territory, and therefore has more fitness then others of its species. The spot is in dense vegetation in an urban backyard while many different food sources. Between the trees in my backyard and the plants in the adjacent yards of my neighbors, there is plenty of forage for this cardinal. I also know that cardinals prefer shrub nesting so this is the preferred vegetation type for this bird.
I also saw an American Robin in the trees in my backyard. I know that robins prefer to nest in trees as opposed to shrubs, so I would assume that this bird’s nest is nearby. American Robins primarily use twigs and dead grass to make their nests. These would not be hard to find, we recently had landscapers come to our house and trim the trees and shrubs in the backyard. The robin simply would have to forage on the ground beneath the tree to obtain twigs. There is also dead grass under the trees that were killed during the trimming. All of the slash that was left by the landscapers covered the grass there and killed it. Robins also use mud to reinforce there nests. Today is a drier day so mud might be hard to find, but the past week we have been having lots of rain which would mean musd is abundant for this bird. Some of the spots in the parking lot of our house are unpaved and only contain mud and gravel. This is only a few years from the tree where I saw the robin, so I would assume this bird would use those parking spots as a mud resource when nesting.

Publicado el 22 de abril de 2024 por juliapolvino