The first time you see a Dickcissel, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a small meadowlark.  In fact, although the two are not really that closely related, they share a few interesting similarities. Both inhabit grassy fields over much of the Great Plains and sing from exposed perches such as fence posts and barbed wires.  The males of both are yellow breasted and sport black, wedge-shaped bibs on their upper breast.  And both are fairly conspicuous breeders in our area in the summertime.

But unlike meadowlarks, which are classified as blackbirds by ornithologists, Dickcissels (which are the size of sparrows) are actually related to cardinals because they have large bills that are used for crushing seeds.   Meadowlarks, on the other hand, have sharper and longer bills more useful for securing insects. 

Dickcissels are more delicate and forsake the United States in favor of the tropics—wintering from western Mexico south through Panama to Columbia east to Venezuela and northern Brazil.   Meadowlarks, too, I should add, also reside in Mexico and South America, but do not wholly abandon their American breeding grounds in late summer in the same way as Dickcissels and do not migrate from continent to continent twice a year.

It might be a nice life, living always in the warm sunshine, but it is during our winters that they face their biggest threats.  Because they are seed eaters, South American farmers have recently started poisoning the birds en masse.  In fact, there are reports of thousands of dead birds left to rot in the fields.  What a short sighted waste.  What impact this will have long term remains to be seen.   While they are still fairly common, at least in our area, in the past decade they do seem to have become much less abundant. 

Amazingly, the birds that survive the winter return to northeast Texas each spring sometime around April 22.  In fact, one day you will not hear or see a single bird, and suddenly the next day, they seem to be everywhere—everywhere there are grasses and brushy fence rows that is.  You see, Dickcissels do not like tall trees.  Short ones are more to their liking because normally this is where they build their nests.  A small persimmon tree, three or four feet tall, or a tiny hackberry, both unwanted trees in a pasture or hay meadow, are where they weave their tiny grassy nests in which they will lay four blue eggs. 

And this is where they are vulnerable during the summer as well.  If the fire ants don’t find the nest before the female begins to sit on the eggs, maybe, just maybe, they will have a chance to raise young and get them out of the nest before the farmer cuts the meadow for hay, binding the tiny nest up, chicks and all, into the bale.  There is no telling how many thousands of birds perish in this manner, but at least the adults are still alive…

Oh, did you say you have never seen a Dickcissel?  Well, why not? They are easy enough to see.  It doesn’t take that much skill or effort and it is well worth it.  Just take a drive out of the city.  Head out in search of grassy pastures and old fields on oil topped roads and then drive slowly.  Look on the fences and on the wires.  Listen for a bird calling dick-cis-sel. Yes, that is how they got their name.  To me it is a very throaty yik, yik, yik.  It is a handsome bird. You will like it. To me it is the sound of summer.