Chat the Pantaloon 

 By P. B. Peabody 



1WANT to tell a few things about the Chat : one of the oddest, most 

 original, most whimsically musical of all North American Birds. 



My acquaintance with him began in the 'Seventies, near Faribault, 

 Minnesota ; where I found him, once, calmly and silently sitting in the 

 undergrowth amid heavy timber. (This was the first record for the State ; 

 though not the first to be published.) Later, I became intimately acquainted 

 with the Chat in the Neosho Valley of Eastern Kansas, in the ' Eighties ; 

 finding, there, nest after nest in the vine-mazes and the luxuriant under- 

 growth of woods and orchards. (And surely no nests, no eggs, are more 

 superb in picturesqueness and in coloring. Deftly hidden they are, too, 

 from the casual seeker. But one who has learned may find them readily : 

 he has but to locate a male Chat, making a clown of himself, in the timber; 

 for the benefit of all concerned). 



A few years later, in extreme Southwestern Minnesota, I found the first 

 and only nest ever found so far as I know,-in that State and in that Latitude. 



In the extreme northeastern corner of Wyoming, that section where 

 the habitats of so many Easterly-Westerly species and subspecies of birds 

 overlap, I became familiar, of late years, with the Long-tailed Chat. This 

 eccentric singer of the night is quite the counterpart of this fellow, in 

 most of his habits and his manners ; except that I credit him with being 

 greatly more shy ; and especially in the placing and subsequent concealing 

 of his nest. Acquaintance with the Long-tailed Chat began in Sundance 

 Valley, in autumn; as I collected, among rose-thickets of the creek-bottom, 

 now denuded of their myriad leaves, several of the characteristic leaf-rootlet- 

 tendril nests. Right then and there I anticipated an intimacy and a ful- 

 ness of summer-tide acquaintance with the Chat which was never, in point 

 of actuality, realized. During the three seasons of my stay in Wyoming, 

 professional duty kept me vibrating between Crook county and Weston 

 county : to my deep satisfaction. Crook county was high among the hills; 

 while Newcastle and Cambria, in Weston county, lay at the lower levels of 

 the desert reaches. The barren stretches of sage-brush, in that region, were 

 seamed, everywhere, with gorges made luxuriant by various and splendid 

 shrubbery. (The red gypsum soil, where caked by drouth is about as pro- 



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