Cheery Red Cardinal

by Lianne Schneider

Title

Cheery Red Cardinal

Artist

Lianne Schneider

Medium

Digital Art - Digital Painting/photographic Art

Description

Digitally hand-painted to achieve the effect of a tapestry - part of a set of six bird paintings done in this style.

The Christmas Cardinal has a very special significance and that is the reason that you can find so many ornaments, decorations and gifts.

It is said that the Christmas Cardinal became known as the Christmas bird because of the brilliant red color in the male species. Hanging a red cardinal ornament in your Christmas tree is supposed to bring good luck, peace and joy to you and your family throughout the coming year. According to the legend, the Christmas Cardinal is a symbol of hope and the bright red color symbolizes the blood that Christ shed for our sins. The Legend of The Red Christmas Cardinal is that its brilliant red color is a reminder to Christians to focus on faith. One this is certain though - the Red Christmas Cardinal looks beautiful on a Christmas tree or Christmas card.

From All About Birds:

The male Northern Cardinal is perhaps responsible for getting more people to open up a field guide than any other bird. They're a perfect combination of familiarity, conspicuousness, and style: a shade of red you can't take your eyes off. Even the brown females sport a sharp crest and warm red accents. Cardinals don't migrate and they don't molt into a dull plumage, so they're still breathtaking in winter's snowy backyards. In summer, their sweet whistles are one of the first sounds of the morning.

Cool Facts

Only a few female North American songbirds sing, but the female Northern Cardinal does, and often while sitting on the nest. This may give the male information about when to bring food to the nest. A mated pair shares song phrases, but the female may sing a longer and slightly more complex song than the male.
Many people are perplexed each spring by the sight of a cardinal attacking its reflection in a window, car mirror, or shiny bumper. Both males and females do this, and most often in spring and early summer when they are obsessed with defending their territory against any intruders. Birds may spend hours fighting these intruders without giving up. A few weeks later, as levels of aggressive hormones subside, these attacks should end (though one female kept up this behavior every day or so for six months without stopping).
The male cardinal fiercely defends its breeding territory from other males. When a male sees its reflection in glass surfaces, it frequently will spend hours fighting the imaginary intruder.
A perennial favorite among people, the Northern Cardinal is the state bird of seven states.
The oldest recorded Northern Cardinal was 15 years 9 months old.

Look for Northern Cardinals in dense shrubby areas such as forest edges, overgrown fields, hedgerows, backyards, marshy thickets, mesquite, regrowing forest, and ornamental landscaping. Cardinals nest in dense foliage and look for conspicuous, fairly high perches for singing. Growth of towns and suburbs across eastern North America has helped the cardinal expand its range northward.

Rare Yellow Cardinal -
(I have a pair of true yellow cardinals of which I have a number of pictures - not good enough to post - that visited my backyard a couple of years but I have not seen them yet this winter).

It is apparently a rare mutation -
The first documented yellow Northern cardinal was "collected" in 1989 by the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University, according to Hill's research paper.

Typical cardinals get their rich red feathers by metabolizing their food into a certain pigment, Palmer-Ball said. With the yellow Northern cardinals - not to be confused with a separate South American species known simply as a yellow cardinal - a mutation causes the metabolic process to create a different type of pigment.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/02/09/1628607/rare-yellow-cardinals-spotted.html#storylink=cpy

Thank you so very much to the following groups for featuring this image:
WISCONSIN FLOWERS AND SCENERY - RANDY
DIGITAL REALISM - ANNE
HARMONY AND HAPPINESS - ERNESTINE
ARTISTIC EXPRESSIONS - JOETTA
ROCK THE SALES - JOETTA
SENSATIONAL ANIMALS - GRETA
ART WITH FLAIR - WILLIAM
CARDS FOR ALL OCCASIONS - JORDAN
MOTIVATION MEDITATION INSPIRATION - BARBARA
EXCELLENT SELF-TAUGHT ARTISTS - JOE
TODAYS BEST ART - DAVID
DIGITAL VEIL - BARBARA
BEAUTY - JAMES
WILDLIFE ONE A DAY - MARIOLA
PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXTURES...DARREN
BOOK COVERS ONE A DAY - JO ANN
3 A DAY WAITING ROOM ART - DARREN
DAILY DOSE OF WISDOM - ETI
ALL NATURAL SCENIC LANDSCAPE - NADINE AND BOB
ALL LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY - NADINE AND BOB
COMFORTABLE ART - JIM
ALL FINE ART AMERICA ARTWORKS - NADINE AND BOB
FAA FEATURED IMAGES - ROBERT
3 A DAY GREETING CARDS - DARREN
MOTIVATION MEDITATION INSPIRATION - BARBARA
NATURE WILDLIFE SUNSETS AND SUNRISES - ELLA
ARTISTS NEWS - NADINE AND BOB
ARTISTS OF WESTERN AND UPSTATE NEW YORK - ROSE
DIGITAL ART AND RESOURCES - ROSEANN
DIGITALLY RE-IMAGINED PHOTOS - DAVID
4000 AND UP - JOE
AAA IMAGES - CHUCK
THE BEST 30000 ARTWORKS - TAIKAN

Copyright Lianne Schneider 2013

All images and my personal poetry/prose are protected by copyright and may not be reproduced, downloaded, distributed, transmitted, copied, reproduced in derivative works, displayed, published or broadcast by any means or in any form without prior written consent from the artist. Copyright on works derived from or based on images in the public domain applies only to the subsequent manipulation or painting resulting from my changes. The original image remains in the public domain and such images are used with in accordance with international copyright laws.

Uploaded

December 7th, 2013

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