A whole letter, free, before you decide anything.

Dear friend,

Every backyard has its winter king, and yours wears red. When the warblers and the swallows pack up in autumn and stream away south, the cardinal considers the whole arrangement and politely declines. The pair that owns your garden in June is the same pair out there in January, sitting in the snow like a lit candle. He isn't actually brighter in winter. The world around him has just gone quiet, and he hasn't.

His story starts with that red, and the red is partly your doing. A cardinal can't make it on his own. It comes from the pigments in what he eats, the dogwood berries, the wild grape, the sunflower hearts you keep putting out. A well-fed male glows like a coal. So when you top up the feeder in the worst week of February, you are, quite literally, keeping him red. I find that thought keeps me warm too.

Listen for the singing, even in the cold, and listen closely, because she sings too. Most female songbirds keep their counsel, but the female cardinal answers him back, sometimes from the nest itself, phrase for phrase, like a duet across the garden. For years the books assumed every singing cardinal was a male. The books, as so often where mothers are concerned, had to be corrected.

Watch the pair long enough and you may catch the sweetest thing in the whole backyard: the male choosing one good seed, hopping over, and tucking it gently into her beak. Scientists call it courtship feeding. Anyone who has ever seen it calls it what it plainly is. Perhaps that devotion is why seven American states, from Ohio down to Virginia, have taken the cardinal as their own. No other bird is loved quite that officially.

He has been stopping people mid-morning for a very long time. Nearly two hundred years ago the Ohio poet William Davis Gallagher wrote of a redbird whose whistle broke a long silence at his window:

When one bright morning, loud and clear,
Its whistle smote my drowsy ear,
Ten times repeated, till the sound
Filled every echoing niche around.

- from "The Cardinal Bird", William Davis Gallagher

That whistle is the same one outside your window this morning. Some songs don't age.

And one more thing, said gently, because I know the phrase lives on cushions and Christmas cards: when cardinals appear, angels are near. It is newer folklore than it feels, but I would never laugh at it, and I hope you never let anyone laugh at it near you. A bird that refuses to leave, that burns red through the greyest month, that lands at the window on the very morning you needed him. If he reminds you of someone you loved, then let him carry that. Birds have been carrying our hearts for as long as we have watched them. It is the oldest job we ever gave them.

Next month I'll write to you about the little birds that stay and survive the winter, which is a braver story than it sounds. Until then, keep the feeder full and the kettle on.

With love,

Maebh

P.S. The print tucked in with this letter would have been him, of course, the male cardinal on his bare winter branch. Some birds choose their own artwork.