Dickcissel

The dickcissel, known by its far less ridiculous scientific name, spiza americana, is a bird that is remarkable for a number of reasons. Though the name itself is rather unusual. I’m a birder, not a linguist, so I don’t know which English-speaking buffoon decided to give this handsome sparrow-like bird with its black and yellow bib such a preposterous name. Don't get me wrong, I definitely appreciate the name.

Last year, the track behind the school where I teach was overrun with dickcissels. They perched on the hackberries and sang. They perched on the telephone wires and sang. They sang from bushes and the tops of bunch grasses. I start my lessons with a ‘bird of the day’ for my students. They love it, and many have told me that they look forward to it each day. Never did I feature the dickcissel. Despite its abundance on campus, I simply did not dare teach my students that such a common schoolyard bird could have such an absurdly silly name.

Last year, I asked my other co-teachers if they thought my students could handle learning the name of this bird.

No.

No way!

Absolutely not.

I even asked some of my more mature students. Their answer was the same. “Don’t do it, Mister.”

Sage advice.

But still, it’s a pretty cool looking bird, and incredibly common at our school. How could I not teach who this was? Thanks to my careful tutelage, my students can already identify mockingbirds, scissor-tailed flycatchers and purple martins. Some of them can even identify juvenile versus adult eastern bluebirds. I assumed they would notice this bird and its rather obvious field marks, and demand its name, wouldn’t they?

Surely they would have, if the birds appeared.

I resolved to teach my students about the dickcissel on the last week of the school, or when someone spotted one and identified it for themselves in one of my classroom field guides, but that moment never came.

But the dickcissel never reared its head.

While our field was overrun with dickcissels last year, this year they were absent. They didn’t appear in the beginning of May, like they did last year, nor did they arrive halfway though.

They simply never arrived.

This is to be expected for dickcissels specifically and migratory birds generally. The timing of their arrival depends on the weather conditions, how they did over winter, even how they did last spring. Dickcissels especially are notable for not returning to the exact same spot every year. What can be an abundant hotspot one May will be devoid of them the next.

And yet, I found myself concerned for the arrival of this silly-sounding bird. What happened to them in South America? I wondered as I set off across the fields in my neighborhood, tall grass brushing against my long pants. The sweat was surely worth the lack of chigger bites.

I knew that they might not come back this year, and yet I found myself thinking about the jungles of South America, the wind farms going up in the Gulf of Mexico. The unusual spring storms.

There are a thousand factors working against the dickcissel, and indeed all migratory birds. Tall buildings, stray cats, and loss of stopover grounds are just some of the newer pieces in a puzzle that has pitted birds against the chaos and hunger of the natural world for thousands of years. They have survived it all for millennia.

So why is it that in 2025, a lousy spring migration feesl like it means something?

Climate change is upon us. Record-setting heat waves and hurricanes make that clear. Texas is becoming increasingly hostile to those of us that like to spend time outdoors.

Will the birds survive?

This is the question I ask myself when I can’t find a bird that should be around. Is this it? Did this population crash? Will I be able to teach my students about this bird next year, or will its population crash before our very eyes? Is this a chance to teach about evolution and extinction, or is this only teaching climate anxieties that no ten-year-old should have to face?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I just know that finding a dickcissel would allow me to stop ruminating on the already-arrived climate apocalypse.

I did end up teaching my students about the dickcissel. As expected, they thought it was absolutely hilarious, and used the bird’s moniker as an insult for those that drop catches. I never did see one with them though. The family that was here last year never arrived.

So despite not needing to set an alarm for summer vacation, I found myself out and about, traipsing around my campus despite it being summer vacation.

After about an hour, I finally heard a single dickcissel. It was calling from somewhere deep in a field of grass. Trying to attract a mate that I saw no evidence of.

I put the single bird on my ebird list, wondering if this would be a modest year for spiza americana, or the last time I would ever hear one in this neighborhood. The last time I could tell my students that I teach them about this silly-named bird because it's a neighbor. 

Only time will tell.