By Dan Weisz
I’ve shared many photos of the Cardinal family in my backyard. The photo below looks like many you have seen, with the beautiful male Cardinal perched on a bracnh of the cholla cactus ready to fly towards the seed feeder. This is a beautiful bird in his best, colorful plumage.
Every once in a while I’ll see the bird doing something interesting. Here, he seemed to say something to me. I’m not sure what, but I didn’t hear him singing.
And then he suddenly began to scratch an itch. Now birds preen every day, cleaning every single feather and puttting them all in place. Here, I don’t think he was preening. He just looked like he was scratching an itch!
And then he kept scratching. He is lowering his head and raising his crest here, but the scratching continues!
It must have felt good, because he didn’t stop for a while.
I think we can all relate to having an itch that just needed attention. This one took him a while to take care of and then, satisfied, he flew off to get another sunflower seed.