Yellow-breasted Chat
Icteria virens
Yellow-breasted Chat · Green-Wood Cemetery · 17 May 2026
A Yellow-breasted Chat in the thicket at Green-Wood, which is where a chat is nearly always found: buried in dense scrub, heard far more often than seen. It breeds in the tangles and old fields of the eastern and southern states and is a scarce passage bird in Brooklyn.
Long classified as an oversized, oddball wood-warbler and only recently split into its own family entirely, on the strength of a voice and a repertoire of behaviour - whistles, chuckles, harsh rattles, and a floppy, deliberate display flight - that never fit comfortably alongside the true warblers. A heavy bill and a bright yellow throat and breast, set off by a white spectacle around the eye, are the field marks.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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