YELLOW-BREASTED CHAT. 
There is no more fone to this bird’s voice than there is 
to that of the Oven-bird; consequently I can not say 
that the intervals as I render them represent true pitch, 
AllI can promise is, that the swing of the Maryland 
Yellow-throat’s voice is accurately reported in the shape 
in which it reached my ear. 
Yellow- The Chat is the largest member of the 
breasted Chat Wrorbler Family, and an eccentric charac- 
Icteria virens - 
L. 7-45 inches ter in the largest sense of the word. His 
May ist colors are bright. Upper parts olive 
green; a broad white line extends from the nostril over 
and back of the eye; region in front of and below the 
eye slaty black graded to olive; eye-ring white; throat 
and chest bright cadmium yellow fading to white on the 
under parts; sides gray-olive. Female similarly marked. 
Nest a rather bulky affair built of dead leaves,.coarse 
grasses, and bark fibre well interwoven, and lined with 
finer material of the same nature; it is lodgedin tangled 
undergrowth, near the ground. This bird is distributed 
from the Gulf States to Massachusetts and Southern 
Minnesota; it winters in Central America. It is shy, 
retiring, and chooses the dense thicket for its home. 
I find it fairly common in the vicinity of New York and 
southward, but I have never seen it near Boston. 
The song of the Yellow-breasted Chat scarcely de- 
serves the name, and it would be a hopeless task to give 
any truthful idea of it by means of the musical staff. 
In the line of music, he can, however, give us an excel- 
lent ritardando and diminuendo, a time arrangement 
exactly the reverse of that of the Field Sparrow; but 
one cannot call such a series of clucks musical: 
Ny ritard. et dim p 
2 A A el Ee OO TS 
[ea Adve 
It is proper to say of this performance that it is a com- 
bination of voice tones without either key or pitch. 
Certain strange and sudden monosyllables of the bird 
r 203 
