262 YELLOW-BREASTED CHAT. 
southern Illinois‘the bird is an abundant summer resident. It is somewhat particular 
in its choice of a place of residence, showing a decided preference for woodland borders, 
old neglected fields, and clearings overgrown with thickets and brier patches. It is 
never found in damp and shady, moist places near water, but prefers upland thickets 
and sunny localities. In Missouri I saw a few sometimes by the end of April, but the 
majority arrived about May 9, when everything was in full spring beauty. The nests 
I found were usually built in tangled basket-vines, or in blackberry bushes, and not 
more than two or three feet from the ground. They are large and compa¢t, consisting 
of old dry leaves, grasses, plant-stems, rootlets, and are lined with brown wiry stems, 
thin strips of bark of the wild grape, and fibrous roots. The eggs, usually four in 
number, are white, marked with reddish-brown and a few fainter lavender spots. , 
In south-eastern Texas I noticed their arrival about April 15. Many spent the 
winter in the dense myrtle-holly thickets overgrown with tangled Smilax Jaurifolia, in 
sheltered places on Buffalo Bayou. They even came, on cold days, into the larger 
gardens, where they found shelter against the furious ‘‘northers” in myrtle, Banksia 
and Cherokee rose, laurel, Cape jasmine, arbor-vitz, cedar, and other thickets. They 
even visited the door-yards to search for food. During such days the birds seemed to 
suffer very much. 
The Chat is a good cage bird if carefully attended to. My friend Mr. Emil Dreier, 
Consul of Denmark, at Chicago, kept one, captured near that city, in a cage. It 
seemed to feel perfectly happy, was in fine plumage, and delighted its keeper by its odd 
and beautiful song. ; 
The Lonc-TaILep CHat, Icteria virens lJongicauda Cours, replaces the common 
Chat in the Western States, from the Plains to the Pacific, south into Mexico. It does 
not differ in its habits from the true species, but it has a decidedly longer tail. 
NAMES: YELLOow-BREASTED Cuat, Chat, Yellow Mockingbird.—Schwdtzer (German). 
SCIENTIFIC NAMES: Turdus virens Linn. (1758). ICTERIA VIRENS Bairp (1865). Muscicapa viridis 
Gmel. (1788). Icteria viridis Bonap. (1825). Pipra polyglotta Wils. (1808). 
DESCRIPTION: “Tail, graduated. Upper parts, uniform olive-green; under-parts, including the inside of 
wing, gamboge-yellow as far as nearly half-way from the point of the bill to the tip of the tail; rest 
of under-parts, white, tinged with brown on the sides; the outer side of the tibie, plumbeous; a 
slight tinge of orange across the breast. Forehead and sides of the head, ash, the lores and region 
helow the eye, blackish. A white stripe from the nostrils over the eye and involving the upper eyelid; 
a patch on the lower lid, and a short stripe from the side of the lower mandible, and running to a 
point opposite the hinder border of the eye, white: Bill, black; feet, brown. Female, like the male, 
but smaller; the markings indistin@; the lower mandible not pure black. 
“Length, 7.40 inches; wing, 3.25; tail, 3.30 inches.” (Ridgway.) 
