They will sometimes scratch their way through an entire seed mix to get every sunflower seed before eating other seeds. Cardinals will also eat safflower seeds and white proso millet when sunflower seeds are not available. Cardinals do not migrate. Although they tend to wander in the winter, seldom do they fly more than a few miles from their nest. Since cardinals do not migrate, the planting of an inviting landscape can attract a cardinal family to your yard for many years.
Cardinals prefer to nest in shrubbery and low trees that face open ground.
They are attracted to landscape plants that are useful both for food and for nesting. Such plants include raspberry, elderberry, cherry, dogwood, hawthorn, viburnum and sumac. They also like having a mixture of several evergreen and deciduous trees nearby.