Yellow-breasted Chat

About the Yellow-breasted Chat

Long filed with the warblers but now given a family all its own, the chat is a strange one: warbler colors on a bird half again too big, with a mockingbird's taste for mimicry and clowning. Science finally gave up and made it the sole member of its family - a one-species puzzle.

Its voice is the giveaway all summer: whistles, rattles, mews, and squawks pouring from deep brush in no particular order, often at night, as if the thicket itself were talking. In display the male flies up above the tangle with slow, exaggerated, almost butterfly wingbeats, legs dangling, singing the whole way - one of the odder performances in Texas birding.

Chats summer across the state in dense regrowth, greenbrier tangles, and streamside thickets, arriving in April and slipping away by late September. For a bird so loud they are absurdly hard to see, keeping a wall of leaves between themselves and everything else.

Persistence at the thicket edge in early morning is the play: males mount an exposed twig for a few minutes at dawn early in the season. Bright yellow breast, white spectacles, heavy bill - unmistakable, on the rare occasion it lets you look.