Can Anyone Explain What This Momma Cardinal Is Doing?

So the video below was uploaded four days ago. It shows a female cardinal being pretty bold in hanging out by, and intermittently trying to get into, our living room window. The video depicts the second time I'd seen this behavior, though the first time she was much less persistent, and since then, she has gotten way more persistent to the point that I'm afraid she's going to really hurt herself.

She does have a mate hanging around, and I'm guessing this has something to do with their nest being close by, but these two have been hangin' around for at least a year and this behavior just started somewhere in the last week to 10 days (there was a gap between the first time and this time that I recorded a little bit of, but I don't know exactly how long it was), and since the recording, it's been happening pretty much from sun-up to sun-down. If I close the curtains, she will move from the living room window to the identical kitchen window about ~15' or a little more to the right on the same wall, and there's a patio couch, coffee table and chair right in front of that that she launches from smacking her beak hard against the glass over and over again. We don't have any curtains on that window, so I'm at a loss to know how to even slow her down without just sitting out there all the time, which does keep her away, but which I can't do for more than a few minutes at a time because I got other stuff to do. Anyway, any advice/info/WAGs about what's going on here would be appreciated, and how to put a stop to it without hurting or having to relocate her would put me in your debt forever! Thanks, here ya go:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXz4cpiSHSI

North side of the house?

She sees her reflection as a territorial intruder. Blinds / curtains balance the light betwixt the sides of the glass negating her reflection.

As to why now? Time to nest? Dunno.

Gotta get something reflective on the inside of those windows or set some sort of hanging decorative something or other on the outside to take her focus off of the glass / her relection.

O.W.

OW's right.... she's driving off that "other" female who is hanging around tempting her mate! Unsuccessfully, of course! If you have to, even spraying something like fake snow/shaving cream on the window outside for a bit to keep her from seeing her reflection will work.

Summerthyme

Yep, i'm gonna go with her seeing her reflection.

I think they're right. Some years ago, I had a male cardinal doing the same thing, and I finally realized he could see the red digital numbers on my alarm clock and thought it was another male cardinal. He was trying to attack it. I turned my clock around so it was not visible from the window, and he stopped hitting the window!

Funny birds. We had a male Cardinal doing that a few years ago. He stayed all Summer and we finally named him Fernando. Great entertainment and he never seemed to hurt himself.

Just updating this thread:

With no good solution to Mrs. Cardinal being able to see her reflection in the windows, I decided to take a different tack. I recalled a controversy up in the Huntsville area when we lived there where a generational farmer was having demanded of him by new subdivision-dwelling neighbors that he stop the crow "repellent" noises he was making in his crop fields with an air cannon. He'd been using the cannon for many years, so apparently it worked against the birds that were scavenging his crops, even if it also worked against his new neighbors' peace and tranquility. Not sure what the outcome of the controversy was, but I had no intention of mounting an air cannon on my front porch anyway, so I contemplated a more subtle version of a sound "repellent."

The first "smart" phone I ever had was this tiny Samsung. I was looking for something in one of my junk drawers one day, and noticed it in there, charging cord all neatly-wrapped and rubber-banded around it and the couple of batteries I had for it removed and laying right next to it in the drawer. I thought, hmm, I wonder if I could find a sound file to upload to that phone that would dissuade Mrs. Cardinal from hanging out on our porch? At first I thought about a recording of a bobcat growl, or maybe a puma. Searched and couldn't find an audio-only file like that, so I searched for eagle, hawk, buzzard and "birds of prey" type of sounds and found a couple of files of hawk sounds that I thought might work. Well, the straight hawk sounds didn't work. Mrs. Cardinal was beatin' herself against the windows just as bad as ever even while the sounds were playing. So I loaded another file of a turkey hawk. It "gobbles" before it makes a very similar sound to the hawk file. I set it in the phone as an alarm sound that went off at varying intervals from dawn to dusk. It worked. Mrs. Cardinal would try to sneak in between each repeat of the alarm for the first few days, but eventually stopped coming on the porch altogether.

The cardinals haven't been around at all since late spring/early summer. Their offspring were hanging out with Mom and Dad for a few weeks after they'd left the nest, but then suddenly they all disappeared, so I figured I might put that old Samsung to use in another capacity and brought it in to install some software for that purpose and start trying it out as a dashcam or home security camera. They make apps for nearly everything, dontchaknow! Anyway, one day a couple or three weeks ago I started hearing the familiar banging on my windows. I gingerly walked to where I could see the window the noise was coming from expecting to see Mrs. Cardinal or one of her kids, but it was a bigger bird, the species of which I have no idea. Looks kinda like a bluejay, only it doesn't have the first hint of blue in its colors, but whatever it was, it split the same day I put the Samsung turkey-hawk alarm back on the porch.

So there ya go. No birds were harmed or killed in the events leading up to this update. LOL We in the house don't even notice the resident turkey-hawk screamin' out its disdain for peace and quiet anymore. Good thing cardinals and other species aren't so-easily conditioned to annoyances! They are still bothered enough by it to stay away, and our porch almost never has bird crap on it anymore to boot. :grin:

Blues

I had stopped at DT in a strip mall this past summer and on the way out noticed an egyptian goose on the sidewalk. He seemed like he was strutting his stuff so I looked around to see if there was a female nearby. Didn't see any in the parking lot but when I turned my attention back to him I noticed him parading in front of very clean blacked out windows from a closed store. He would stretch his neck, strut, get close to the glass, back away and do it again. Occasinally he would spread his wings and flap a time or two. He was so busy with admiring himself that he didnt see me moving closer to him until I was within 3 feet or so. He finally stopped & flew off when some little kid let out a scream.


They sure are beautiful. I've seen them hanging around the community golf course (just a couple blocks from the strip mall) for the past several years. A few weeks before Irma hit I saw a mama and 7 babies cross the road in front of me as I drove past the course. They werent very big and did not have the yellowish color of the wild muskovie chicks that I see almost daily. They were more of a light tannish & dark brown coloration. I drive by there frequently on the way home and have not seen them since the storm. I sure hope they survived and show up again soon.

Blues!! Very ingenius!! Now you've got me wondering if there would be any possiblity that I could use something like that to get rid of several hundred verdamnt English Sparrows... they eat more grain than my chickens, and I'm SICK of them.

Hubby can't seem to find the time to make another couple treadle feeders (which keep the grain enclosed and require a chicken-weight bird to stand on the platform to open the feeder for access to the grain), and I use almost 5x as much grain in the pen with the open feeder as I do in the pen with twice as many laying hens which has the treadle feeder! As much as he bitches about the grain bill, you'd think he'd eventually put two and two together and help me make a couple more of those... LOL!!

(in his defense, he's not exactly sitting around, and he just hasn't really figured out how much those birds eat, despite my telling him about it... maybe if I had him feed them for a couple weeks it would sink in... sigh)

Anyway... they also make an awful mess in the machine shed, peck holes in the tomatoes and we have to keep bird netting over the blueberries all season so we get the berries rather than the birds.

We used to have quite a few hawks around, but a large flock of crows has moved in over the past 3-4 years, and they even drove away my gorgeous leuchistic (almost pure white, with a few red tail feathers) red tail hawk female, who used to nest every summer in our woods. I hate crows!!

I'm going to see if it might be possible to adapt your idea... I think first I'll set up my game camera near the chicken pen that suffers the greatest depredations and get an idea of what time of day they raid the place. They're damned smart birds... they know pretty much when I show up to feed, and after I caught several with a net and dispatched them, I almost never find one in the pen at feeding time anymore. But if I walk in at an off time, such as mid morning or the middle of the afternoon, there can be as many as several dozen flying around in there.

Summerthyme