In order to guarantee the long-term serviceability and safety of cablestayed bridges, the development of feasible methods in monitoring and diagnosing the bridge damages has become an important issue in related researches. Most of the previous methods directly adopted the measurements from girder to detect its changes in dynamic characteristics and then identify the possible extent and location of bridge damages. However, it generally requires a great amount of efforts in measuring and analyzing the ambient vibration signal from girder. Since the stay cables are the primary members in transmitting the internal forces of the whole structure, it is consequently obvious to consider them as a more convenient measuring target for the damage recognition of cable-stayed bridges. The major objective of this study is to develop a systematic method for identifying the natural frequencies of stay cables as well as those of girders from the ambient cable vibration signals. The dynamic characteristics of stay cables are first described in this paper, followed by the demonstration of this method using the ambient cable vibration measurements from the Chi-Lu Cable-stayed Bridge. It is expected that the results of this research will simplify the diagnosis of structural damages of cable-stayed bridges.