Listen:
Northern Cardinal songs and essay from Lang Elliot's new book, "The Songs of Wild Birds".

It wasn’t too many years ago that seeing a Cardinal in northern Minnesota was a rare thing.  Now it’s fairly common.  Last year, students in the Forest View Middle School Bird Club in Baxter, the DNR’s Non-Game Wildlife Department, and 91.7 KAXE sponsored a first-ever Northern Cardinal survey.  We asked KAXE listeners of all ages and from all over northern Minnesota to send us their Cardinal sightings between Saturday, December 23^rd and Tuesday, January 2^nd of 2006.  The DNR mapped all the sightings (below).