MNbirdwatcher
New member

We live in southern Minnesota and like to feed the birds who are willing to stay around during the winter. It was very cold today (12/21/24), starting below zero and only getting up to the teens above, with a few inches of snow on the ground. The feeders were packed out. There was the usual assortment of finches, chickadees, a couple of nuthatches, dozens of juncos, downy and hairy woodpeckers, and a pair of cardinals. Then I spotted a very unusual bird eating from a ground platform--it looked like a black cardinal. Definitely the size and profile of a cardinal, with a slightly longer crest and a black beak. The feathers were all black, but there were dark reddish-black feathers on the tips of the wings and the tail. When I mentioned it to my partner, he brushed it off but he saw it too a few hours later. It closely resembled the Phainopepla in the Cornell lab ID page, but its range is nowhere near Minnesota, but about a thousand miles south of here. Wish I could have gotten a photo!