NIC Cardinals Mascot Inspires Playful Plan to Bring Birds to North Idaho

Before anyone calls Idaho Fish and Game to ask about the cardinal air-drop: it was a joke. A very North Idaho kind of joke.

The Coeur d'Alene Press published a satirical piece on April 1 describing a tongue-in-cheek plan to introduce northern cardinals to the region so that North Idaho College's Cardinals mascot would finally be geographically accurate. The fictional coordinator behind the scheme, one "Scott 'Kingfisher' Kestrel, Idaho Fish and Game regional avian logistics coordinator," does not appear to exist in any agency directory, and the proposed bird drop was accompanied by an artist's rendering and references to community listening sessions. That said, the underlying mascot history it riffs on is entirely real.

In 1939, when NIC moved to its present campus on the former Fort Sherman grounds at the north end of Lake Coeur d'Alene, the school held a student competition to pick a new nickname. A first-year student named Glen Nogle won it by suggesting Cardinals, lifted not from regional ornithology but from his favorite Major League Baseball team: the St. Louis Cardinals. The name stuck. In 1984, the college introduced a logo featuring mountains, trees and water to give the cardinal a more Pacific Northwest feel, and in 1986, the mascot was formally named Cecil after then-Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus.

The April Fools' piece pointed out the obvious: northern cardinals are not native to North Idaho. Their range runs through the eastern United States from Maine south to Texas, and west into New Mexico and the southern edges of Arizona and California, stopping well short of the Idaho Panhandle. Getting one to Kootenai County without human intervention would require the bird to be significantly lost.

What Idaho Fish and Game actually does when it comes to wildlife introductions is considerably less theatrical. The agency has, for instance, conducted real relocation projects moving fishers, the weasel-family animal related to wolverine and marten, from the Clearwater Region into the Panhandle Region, with monitoring of movements and habitat use. Those decisions involve extensive ecological review; they do not involve Facebook polls.

For residents curious about what birds genuinely belong outside their windows right now, the answer is considerably richer than a scarlet songbird from the Midwest. Osprey and bald eagles nest in standing dead trees along Lake Coeur d'Alene's shoreline. Woodpeckers and Pygmy Nuthatches work the forested hillsides. American Robins are pulling worms out of yards across the county, and Downy Woodpeckers can be lured to suet feeders in nearly any neighborhood. The Coeur d'Alene Audubon Society runs regular field trips along what local birders call the NIC Loop, a stretch along Lake Coeur d'Alene and the mouth of the Spokane River named for its proximity to the college itself.

Anyone who spots something genuinely unusual, a bird that does not belong here or a species they cannot identify, can report it through Idaho Fish and Game's wildlife sighting tool at idfg.idaho.gov.

Cecil the Cardinal, meanwhile, will remain on the sideline at NIC games without any logistical support from a regional avian coordinator. The accreditation crisis that shadowed the college in 2023 has been resolved, NIC has returned to full standing with its accrediting agency, and the Kootenai County community's attachment to the institution, mascot anomaly and all, appears intact. Glen Nogle, who could not have known in 1939 that his baseball loyalties would outlast a century of ecological reality checks, would likely approve.