Syracuse.com - CNY bird watcher's Web site leads to dickcissel photo

[HuntingNY-News]

I’ll give one thing to bird-watching enthusiasts. They don’t mind sharing. In fact, they thrive on it.

Diana Whiting photoA dickcissel, photographed by Diana Whiting.

I’ll give one thing to bird-watching enthusiasts.

They don’t mind sharing. In fact, they thrive on it.

Diana Whiting, of Skaneateles, an award-winning wildlife photographer, recently benefited from that. She saw on Cayuga Birding List, an online website where birders share sightings of birds, that there had been a sighting of dickcissels at the Seneca Meadows Wetlands Preserve in Seneca Falls.

She drove there with a couple of friends, John Garofalo and Carol Keeler, and after three trips managed to snap a good picture of the bird. The 576-acre preserve, by the way, is across the street from Seneca Meadows landfill, though you wouldn’t know it, Whiting and others said. It’s a great place to go birding.

“A dickcissel is a Midwestern bird that’s not normally here. That’s why it’s such a big deal,” Whiting said. “There were people up there from Buffalo, Rochester, Binghamton — all to see the bird.”

Birders feed such information into bird alert websites across the country.

“The spirit of the bird alerts is that everyone shares,” Whiting said. “It’s like having more eyes in the field.”

A dickcissel is a “sparrow-like bird of the prairie grasslands of the United States. The breeding male is colored like a tiny meadowlark, with a black ‘V’ on a yellow chest,” according to the Cornell Lab or Ornithology website.

So how does one go about finding a sparrow-sized bird in a 576-acre preserve?

Carrying a field guide with pictures is a start. Birders who carry smart phones can also download the dickcissel’s song, play it and become familiar with it. If they hear it in the wild, they can home in on it.

The bird alert sites are a huge help. Sometimes the directions given are general; other times, they are very specific. Using the website, Whiting said she was able to locate the birds in a certain oak tree about a quarter of a mile from the parking lot.

“ I found a male and female, and maybe another male,” she said, adding she snapped her photo from about 200 feet away, using a high-powered, telephoto lens.

Kevin McGowen, a spokesman from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, acknowledged there’s been a buzz lately in the birding community about dickcissels — not only in Central New York, but in other parts of the country.

“It a funny bird,” he said. “They do these periodic adventures eastward, and we see them around here every now and then.”

Whiting speculated that the birds may be showing up here because of the drought in the Midwest. She said Bird List websites for areas in Canada note they’re being seen up there as well.

“I just heard from someone in Minnesota and they’re seeing them there in every county in the state,” McGowen said. “They’re usually just in the grasslands, but a lot of them have moved to the edges of their distribution.”

Whiting said she likes the challenge of photographing a rare or unique bird. To see more of her wildlife photos, check out her website .

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog