This time of year, people are reporting a wide variety of signs of spring. Some are pleasant; a friend who lives on North Haven recently shared photos of her newly blossoming mini alpine hellebore plants. Others are not so pleasant: during the middle of the recent rains and subsequent snow melt, another friend’s sump pump quit on them—in the middle of the night!

And then there are the “birds of spring.” Never mind the robins, huge flocks of them have been with us all winter, feeding off last fall’s dried fruits and berries. Red-winged blacked birds are a better bell weather of the coming season, and they’ve been making appearances here and there, along with a few common grackles and brown-headed cowbirds. Prior to the blackbirds came the turkey vultures, soaring high in search of a thawing carcass on which to feed.

We thought we caught a glimpse of our first-of-year eastern meadowlark in with a big flack of starlings—it turned out to be a starling with white tail feathers! But the common mergansers have indeed begun to flock up in the Kennebec; we enjoy watching them bobbing about, diving for small fish and invertebrates among the river’s melting ice pack. But they’ve yet to reach the impressive numbers that are to come in the approaching weeks.

So we turn our attention to our favorite sign-of-spring “wake-up call,” the song of the northern cardinal. Last week, just as the sun crept into our bedroom from between the curtains, there was the familiar and long-missed, “cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer,” spilling in like an early-morning dream. We imagined the cardinal in one of his favorite perches, the tall crab apple tree just outside our window, his head tipped back and his bill open in full song. We peaked out and there he was in all of his red glory, oblivious to our admiring eyes.

A few days later, as we drove into our driveway in the late afternoon, we had the pleasure of hearing and seeing two cardinals singing—a male in one tree and a female singing in another. Northern cardinals are one of only a few North American species in which both the male and female sing. In our case, both abruptly stopped and froze completely still. We assumed the sharp-shinned hawk that has been a visitor to our feeding station throughout the winter must have made an appearance nearby, though darned if we could find it!

Northern cardinals are found throughout the eastern and southern United States, reaching parts of southern Quebec in the northern part of their range and into Mexico in the southern part. They do not migrate, and they do not have seasonal plumage changes; the adult males maintain their shock of red feathers and the females keep their subtle but stunning reddish-brown appearance throughout the year. Most people with a bird feeder know that cardinals feed on seeds, with a special fondness for black oil sunflower seeds. Perhaps it comes as a surprise to know they also eat beetles, spiders, moths, flies, and other insects, as well as fruits and seeds from trees (sumac and dogwood, for example) and grasses.

We find it a bit amusing that a bird that remains with us here in Maine year-round, bearing the frigid temperatures and freezing winds, is also one of our favorite signs of spring in Maine. Maybe that’s exactly why it is!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”