Natural Beauty

Admire these priceless moments captured by readers.

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While I was birding with my granddaughter in late July at Killdeer Plains, a local wildlife area in central Ohio, she told me to stop the car and back up. Posing and singing for us nearly within arm’s reach of the car was this lovely male dickcissel. Not 10 minutes earlier, we had almost given up birding for the day because it had rained.

Laura Marshall

PROSPECT, OHIO

SOUNDING OFF

A member of the cardinal family, the dickcissel got its interesting name from the male’s song, which sounds a lot like dick-dick-cissel-cissel.