The Northern Cardinal’s diet shifts significantly through the year — heavy on seeds in fall and winter, heavy on insects in summer during breeding season, with fruit bridging the gaps in between. Understanding what cardinals actually eat at each time of year explains why they visit your feeder year-round but use it differently depending on the season.
What Cardinals Eat by Season
Fall and Winter: Seeds Dominate
Seeds make up roughly 90% of the winter diet. Cardinals are granivores by nature — their thick, conical bill is built specifically for cracking open seeds, and they’re exceptionally efficient at it. Seeds they prefer in fall and winter:
- Black oil sunflower seed — the single most effective feeder food for cardinals. Thin shell, high fat content, easy for a cardinal’s bill to crack. If you want cardinals at your feeder, this is the food.
- Safflower seed — bitter taste deters squirrels and House Sparrows but cardinals take it readily. A good choice if squirrels are a problem.
- White millet — especially popular with female cardinals foraging on the ground
- Sunflower chips (hulled sunflower) — no shell waste, quick to eat, high energy. Cardinals, especially juveniles, prefer hulled seed because the energy return per bite is faster.
- Cracked corn — supplementary food, less preferred than sunflower but accepted
- Peanut pieces — high fat, taken occasionally at platform feeders
Wild seeds that cardinals eat heavily in fall include wild grasses, weeds, and native plants: wild sunflower, goldenrod, cosmos, coneflower, and many others. A yard with native plantings left standing through winter provides a natural seed source that complements any feeder setup.
Spring and Summer: Insects Become Critical
As breeding season begins, the cardinal’s diet shifts significantly. Insects become essential — not because cardinals like them more, but because the nestlings need protein that seeds can’t provide.
Adult cardinals feed nestlings almost exclusively on insects in the first week after hatching. Beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, cicadas, caterpillars, and flies are all taken. Both parents feed the young, with the male often taking primary responsibility for feeding while the female begins her second clutch.
This is why pesticide use near cardinal feeding areas matters in summer — eliminating the insect population removes food that nesting cardinals depend on for raising their young, regardless of how well-stocked the sunflower feeder is.
Year-Round: Fruit and Berries
Cardinals eat fruit throughout the year, with consumption peaking when wild berries are ripe in summer and fall. Preferred fruits include:
- Dogwood berries
- Wild grape
- Mulberry — a major summer food source where available
- Serviceberry (Amelanchier)
- Hackberry
- Holly berries — important winter food
- Elderberry
- Sumac berries
Cardinals don’t digest fruit the same way fruit specialists like Cedar Waxwings do. They tend to pick individual berries and consume them whole, or occasionally peck at larger fruit rather than swallowing it in one piece.
How Cardinals Eat at Feeders
Cardinals are platform feeders by preference. Unlike chickadees and finches that cling to tube feeders, cardinals prefer to stand on a flat surface to eat — their body is too large and their balance poorly suited to hanging feeders. A tube feeder with a wide tray attachment works; a dedicated platform feeder works better.
Cardinals also feed on the ground underneath feeders, picking up seeds that other birds knock down. This ground feeding is particularly common in winter and is easier to observe than feeder behavior since the birds are at eye level and less disturbed by nearby movement.
Feeding times: cardinals are among the first birds at feeders in the morning and one of the last in the evening, taking advantage of low-competition windows around dawn and dusk. They’re also one of the few feeder birds active in light snowfall — a cardinal at a snow-dusted feeder is one of the most commonly photographed backyard wildlife scenes in North America.
Male vs Female Feeding Behavior
One of the most distinctive cardinal behaviors is courtship feeding — a male picks up a seed, hops to the female, and passes it to her bill-to-bill. This behavior looks gentle and deliberate, and it is: it serves as both a bond-reinforcing act and a practical food transfer that allows the female to keep foraging without leaving a prime spot.
Outside of courtship, males and females often feed separately and the male is typically dominant at feeders. When both approach the same feeder, the male usually feeds first. However, outside of breeding season, this dominance is less pronounced and mixed-sex groups commonly feed together.
What Not to Feed Cardinals
A few foods to avoid:
- Bread and pastry — no nutritional value, fills them up without providing energy or protein
- Salted seeds or nuts — salt is harmful to birds in quantity
- Honey — ferments quickly and can cause bacterial infections
- Fruit treated with pesticides — wash any fruit before putting it out
Best Feeders for Cardinals
Platform feeders and hopper feeders with wide trays work best. The key requirement is a flat surface large enough for the cardinal to stand comfortably while eating. Tube feeders with small perches don’t work well for a bird this size.
Feeder placement matters too. Cardinals prefer feeders within 5-10 feet of dense shrubs or trees — they want to be able to retreat quickly to cover if startled. A feeder in the middle of open lawn with no nearby cover gets far fewer cardinal visits than one near a hedgerow or evergreen shrub.
FAQ: What Do Cardinals Eat?
What is the best food to attract Northern Cardinals?
Black oil sunflower seed, offered on a platform feeder or a tube feeder with a wide tray. If squirrels are a problem, safflower seed attracts cardinals but most squirrels won’t eat it.
Do cardinals eat fruit?
Yes — dogwood berries, wild grape, mulberry, holly, and serviceberry are among their favorites. Fruit consumption peaks in summer and fall when berries are ripe.
Do cardinals eat insects?
Yes, especially in summer during breeding season. Nestlings are fed almost entirely on insects in their first week. Adults eat significantly more insects in spring and summer than in winter.
Why do cardinals disappear from feeders in summer?
They shift to natural food sources as insects become abundant and berries ripen. They’re still in the area — just less dependent on the feeder. Activity at feeders typically picks back up in fall as natural food becomes scarce.
For more on attracting cardinals, see our guides on what it means when a cardinal visits you, Northern Cardinal identification, and cardinal symbolism and meaning.
MD Imdadul Haque is the founder of BirdzFly, a research-backed resource on North American backyard birds. Drawing on years of independent study into bird identification, behavior, and migration patterns, he writes in-depth guides designed to help US birders understand the species in their own backyards — from common feeder visitors to seasonal migrants passing through.
