Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) at Zoo Berlin - April 4th 2014

By far the best photograph I have ever taken of this unusual passerine.

A male would have been more spectacular.

Are they really that unusual? They're almost a trash bird around here.

Fun fact, there's a proposal to split the species 6 ways.

The whole family are pretty odd, and a nice example of parallel evolution

@jbn, I believe there are over 20 zoos in Europe displaying them (only 2 in UK, which may explain TLD ) and they are pretty common in private hands. But they are also the most common of their family in Europe.... But probably in the US it is the other way around with species being really common in the wild in Europe, being rare in the US.

lintworm said:

(only 2 in UK, which may explain TLD )

Click to expand...

Hehe, as I alluded above I didn't actually mean they were unusual in captive collections - I literally meant the cardinals are an unusual group of birds being as they display convergent evolution when compared with not one, but two separate groups of Old World passerines, the buntings and the finches - but unlike those two groups, which *are* represented in the New World, there are no cardinals in the Old World.