Maren Gimpel and I spent a few hours this afternoon looking for Dickcissels in the middle of the county in an effort to further document this year's invasion. We made several stops on our route, and just one stop had Dickcissels. Along Perkins Hill road we had 6 singing males and 4 females, two of which were carrying food. Interestingly, this area was mostly cool season grass with a smaller area of warm season grass and 7 out of the 10 birds were in the smaller warm season grass area. Most of the other areas we checked were cool season grass which was 3-4 feet tall and had bushes and saplings coming up, but held no Dickcissels. However, these areas looked promising and I will check them again.


I would encourage more people to check all possible good habitat for Dickcissels when you're out birding to document as many birds as we can during this invasion year. Perhaps even doing some targeted searches would turn up some birds in unexpected areas. Looking at the sightings map in eBird at the end of this breeding season will be fun!! 


Dan Small
Chestertown, MD

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