Cardinals | Cardinalidae

Kardinaalachtigen | Cardenales

An exclusively American family of medium-sized seed-eaters, recognisable by the bill: heavy, short and purely conical, with a curved upper edge and a broad base, built to crack hard seeds and stones and, in summer, to deal with caterpillars and beetles as well. The second mark is the difference between the sexes. The breeding male carries one saturated colour over almost the whole body — red, deep blue, or blue with chestnut and yellow — while the female is warm brown to olive, with at most a wash of that colour on rump and tail edges. Outside the breeding season the male moults into the same inconspicuous brown, so that autumn and winter birds are barely separable by sex and age and must be worked out on bill shape and tail length. They live in scrub, woodland edge and rank margins, sing from a high post and build an open nest low in a bush.