Waiting for Dickcissels
A quest to see an ordinary bird and plant of the week
“Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?”
—Vladimir, Waiting for Godot
“You find people; you find them. Something... It—is it karma? Maybe. But we found him; that's the important thing—and I got Bonnie a wonderful pantsuit.”
—Corky St Clair, Waiting for Guffman
In June, Priya and I finally traveled back home to see our families in Illinois and Missouri. And, since we were in the Midwest in early summer, I figured I might as well try to see Dickcissels.
Dickcissels are a bird in the cardinal family with yellow breasts and brown wings. In their short breeding season, they fly up from Argentina and nest in a variety of grassland habitats, preferring spots we might think of as weedy: lots of wildflowers, in other words. This means roadsides or hayfields can host numerous Dickcissels (until they’re mowed or harvested, of course.) But they don’t like a high proportion of trees in the landscape, so they can be tricky to find in urban or suburban areas where forests have replaced historic prairies and savannahs. And if wall-to-wall agriculture has wiped out all the wildflowers, they become hard to find in the countryside, too.
My best chance at seeing one, I figured, would be simply on the drive from Midway Airport in Chicago to Peoria. Priya’s sister Sara was picking us up from the airport and driving us home. The route would take us through miles of grassy roadsides along corn and soy fields, with nary a tree in sight.
Once we got off the interstate and onto a two-lane highway, I looked carefully into the roadside streaming past. In the background, cropfields stretched for miles, with wind turbines on the horizon. Just a few feet away past the shoulder, tufts of unmown grass looked like great Dickcissel nesting habitat. Sometimes, I’d spot a brown blur at the top of a grass stalk, or thought I did. I opened the window to listen for the bird’s song, heard the roar of the wind, and closed it again. We were going too fast to see a small bird in detail. Once we got into Peoria, I figured, it would be a simple matter of taking a 15-20 minute trip to a likely spot, a place where Dickcissels could not fail to reside.
The next day, the first place we looked was part of a tour of Priya and Sara’s old school district, a few miles past the edge of Peoria. On the way out, Sara pointed to an unmown hill on the side of a roundabout and asked if that would be a good Dickcissel spot. Maybe, I said, but I didn’t see any at the moment. After driving around the school district, we stopped at the edge of town. A bike path bordering a cropfield ran past the town library. Between the path and the cropfield, wildflowers grew and bloomed in abundance.
It looked promising. But I didn’t hear the Dickcissel’s signature song (which is supposed to sound like its name.) Maybe we just spooked them when we got here, I thought, and occupied myself taking pictures of compass plant, prairie milkweed, and Illinois bundleflower. Yet no Dickcissels stirred as I walked the length of the wildflower planting. Too close to the edge of town, maybe? We’d have to try another place.
On our return, we took the scenic route through the countryside. As we turned a corner, I noticed an alfalfa field. Dickcissel heaven, I thought, remembering alfalfa patches in Nebraska loaded with them. We pulled over to listen for songs. I thought I might have heard one as we pulled up, but after a few minutes we gave up and carried on.
The Dickcissel isn’t a rare species. But once you set a goal of seeing a specific bird, laws of the cosmos are invoked that make it a baffling and chaotic quest to find it. Whether it’s a Tufted Titmouse or an Eastern Bluebird, you will find yourself in locations where they ought to be, by all that is logical, and yet they are not. Then you are faced with the question: stay here and wait for the bird, demanding it to correct its offense to the laws of the universe, or go elsewhere and accept seeing it in a place where it makes less sense to your expectations.
This principle was most strongly in effect when we visited a managed grassland in the bluffs of the Illinois River, part of the Singing Woods Nature Reserve. Here was a properly tended grassland, burned this spring according to Sara, meaning that many native plants adapted to fire had grown rapidly, reaching chest height by mid-June. Here we will find our Dickcissel, I thought. At least one, surely.
We took the loop trail through the grassland. Common Yellowthroats sang every few dozen yards. House Wrens burbled from the nearby woods. Yet the seemingly tailor-made habitat had no Dickcissels.
To be fair, the broader landscape was not really what a Dickcissel looks for—up in forested bluffs, a ground-nesting bird is vulnerable to all the critters that live in a forest: raccoons and possums, reptiles, squirrels, who would all love to eat Dickcissel eggs. Cowbirds that parasitize Dickcissel nests by laying their own eggs in it for the parents to raise can use trees as vantage points to spot their next victims. Yet standing in the grassland, you’d think: this place has to be big enough for a single Dickcissel. And maybe it was. But we didn’t see it.
By this point, I had certainly started thinking about the merits of continuing to look for this bird when we had plenty of other family events keeping us busy. The payoff of seeing a small brownish cardinal-cousin that I could probably see elsewhere: was it worth it? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That I waited for Dickcissels when we could have been getting ice cream?
I decided to put the Dickcissel quest on the backburner. It was just about being in the right place at the right time. Really, it was a matter of getting a few miles out of town and finding any old weedy spot, but that’s not a trip I could easily sell to others less obsessed.
The next day, we were driving home from seeing Priya’s friends and their baby. The route took us out to a subdivision built on former agricultural land. On the way home, we had the windows down. We drove through a roundabout, with the subdivision still in sight behind us. As we exited the roundabout, I heard a crystal-clear Dickcissel song from the weedy hill that Sara had pointed out days before. I told Priya that the quest was over: we had found our bird.
That evening, we had a few minutes to try and see it in person. The rest of the group good-naturedly came along as we parked on the shoulder of a busy road and peered into the grass for small brownish birds. There were at least three Dickcissel pairs on the little hill. It was too dark to get a clear picture, but we could see them pretty well even with the naked eye. Like robins, Dickcissels sing until dark.
Unlike Waiting for Godot (or Guffman), the long-awaited character arrives at the end of this story. But like those stories, there is a sense of anticlimax. The Dickcissel is not a bird-of-paradise. It’s an ordinary species in this region, found often on roadsides, though greatly declined due to loss of habitat. And my own ideas of what was sensible Dickcissel nesting grounds clouded my ability to see with their eyes and find them.
The debrief from this mission goes something like this: if you start striking out looking for a bird that, by rights, should be there, don’t wait too long. Just go look somewhere else. And you might as well take pictures of flowers along the way.
Plant of the week: Compass plant
Here’s one of the species we saw along the way to finding Dickcissels. Compass plant (Silphium laciniatum) is native to the tallgrass prairies and savannahs of the Midwest and parts of the Eastern U.S. The name comes from the notion that the leaves point north-south, which isn’t always true (I mean, if you’re a sun-loving plant, you’d probably face south, though.) The leaves are distinctive: big, hairy, and with deep lobes.
Compass plant produces a thick resin that Native Americans of the Plains have used as chewing gum. The species is well-adapted to periodic fire, bursting forth after a spring burn, and can handle drought and nutrient-poor soils. Its flower stalks reach up to 12 feet high, towering above the rest of the prairie plants, even big bluestem. Here are some growing stems we saw outside of St. Louis:
It’s July, so you might think summer is half over. But compass plant is still growing, so don’t get too fatalistic yet.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Wampanoag and Narragansett land.