My first Cardinal!

 Yeah, yeah, I know everybody has seen them, but this is my first "wild" encounter.  J  Isn't he lovely?

I don't know enough about them to tell you whether it's male or female, so... hello Google! This interesting little article on Cardinals advises that the red ones are male, and the brown are female. However, the females have orange beaks too, so this little brown bird that was in the tree at the same time as the big red guy above, was obviously not his mate.

Wiki is kind enough to have a photo of a female on their web page, and this bird has neither the black face nor orange beak. So I have no idea what it is, but it was in the tree at the same time as my Cardinal visitor, giving it an honorary place on this post. Anyone wanna identify him/it/her in the comments?