Now, if you aren\u2019t a birder, you may have never heard of the dickcissel<\/a>, a grasslands bird with a curious name. \u201cDickcissel\u201d is an imitation of the sparrow-size bird\u2019s tune. If you are a birder (as I am), you probably haven\u2019t seen dickcissels all that often inside Chicago\u2019s city limits. That\u2019s why I was fascinated to hear one singing in this field of grass, weeds, and shrubs northeast of Wabansia and Ada Street \u2014\u00a0a location that used to be a filling station for city vehicles<\/a>.<\/p>\n I returned the next morning with my camera and telephoto lens. Visual confirmation! I saw at least one dickcissel, with a lovely mix of yellow, black, and brown feathers. It was perched on a shrub behind the fence, singing away. I thought I saw a second dickcissel, too, but I wasn\u2019t sure.<\/p>\n I eagerly shared the news of my sighting in a birding forum on the Discord social media platform. And several other birders flocked to this North Side corner to see the dickcissels with their own eyes. When I returned on July 9, a dickcissel was still there \u2014 three and a half weeks after I\u2019d first heard one.<\/p>\n As it turned out, I wasn\u2019t the first person who\u2019d spotted dickcissels in this section of Lincoln Yards. Almost exactly one year earlier, Illinois Audubon Society<\/a> board member Andrea Tolzmann and her son Simon drove past the same spot, with the windows of their car rolled down.<\/p>\n \u201cI heard a dickcissel,\u201d Simon recalls. \u201cI was like, \u2018Mom, you should pull over.\u2019\u201d Simon, who\u2019s now 20, has been birding since he was 11. \u201cI was pretty surprised to hear it so close to downtown, in a city where there\u2019s seemingly no adequate prairie to house these grassland specialists. I was even more surprised to hear it coming from the construction site. I remember looking out and seeing invasive plants. I remember thinking: What does a dickcissel see here that it couldn\u2019t get somewhere else? This is really, really, really cool.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrea and Simon saw four dickcissels on that occasion, reporting the sighting on the eBird website<\/a>. They also saw 15 other bird species, including killdeer, cedar waxwing, savannah sparrow, and song sparrow. And they included this comment on eBird: \u201cGood thing sterling bay doesn\u2019t have funding to completely destroy this place yet!!\u201d<\/p>\n Dickcissels are not a rare or endangered species, though they are hard to find in urban places like Chicago. \u201cIf you go out into the agricultural areas near the Illinois River, there are dickcissels all over the place,\u201d says Douglas Stotz<\/a>, senior conservation ecologist at the Field Museum. But when these birds migrate here from South America for their summer breeding season, they can\u2019t find much suitable habitat in Chicago. \u201cWe don\u2019t have much grassland,\u201d Stotz says.<\/p>\n Dickcissels occasionally pop into the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary<\/a>, but they don\u2019t seem to stick around there for very long. They\u2019re also seen in Big Marsh Park<\/a> on the Southeast Side. But their main Chicago hangout is Park No. 566 \u201cUSX,\u201d<\/a> a grassy 70-acre swath of land along the South Side lakefront, covering a portion of U.S. Steel\u2019s former South Works facility. Over the past week, birders have counted as many as 26 dickcissels in the park. \u201cGiven the numbers that get reported, I have to believe they breed there,\u201d Stotz says.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t known whether dickcissels are nesting in Lincoln Yards, but they\u2019re certainly staying there for an extended time during their breeding season. Their presence offers some evidence that this location, which is along the western side of the Chicago River\u2019s North Branch, would be a good spot for a nature park.<\/p>\n Sterling Bay had planned to build residential and office skyscrapers nearly 600 feet tall on the 54-acre Lincoln Yards site, with park space along the river, before the project stalled. In June, Tribune architecture columnist Edward Keegan suggested turning the whole thing into a park<\/a>, but that seems unlikely.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/lincoln-yards-land-1024x683.jpg\")
The dickcissels\u2019 presence offers some evidence that this location, which is along the western side of the Chicago River\u2019s North Branch, would be a good spot for a nature park. <\/p>\n