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Updated: June 12, 2025
I have heard of a collector who boasted of having taken one hundred sets of the eggs of the marsh wren, in a single day; of another, who took in the same time, thirty nests of the yellow-breasted chat; and of still another, who claimed to have taken one thousand sets of eggs of different birds in one season. A large business has grown up under the influence of this collecting craze.
One cannot blame him for wanting to sleep in peace, with no sound but the gurgle of the creek two rods away, and the warbling call of a little, yellow-breasted bird in the alders near by. It was Fred Humphrey tramping wearily into camp three hours later, who awoke him. Fred was an altogether different type of man, and he was not so careful to conceal his own desires.
I seldom go the Rock Creek route without being amused and sometimes annoyed by the yellow-breasted chat. This bird also has something of the manners and build of the catbird, yet he is truly an original. The catbird is mild and feminine compared with this rollicking polyglot. His voice is very loud and strong and quite uncanny.
The sun, which was still high, was shining as only a Wyoming sun can shine, from out of a blue-vaulted canopy, flecked with fleecy clouds. Swinging from the tops of the sagebrush, or an occasional cottonwood, yellow-breasted meadowlarks were singing sweetly.
To take everything as equally good, to know no difference between bitter and sweet, penury and plenty, slander and praise, this is a great attainment, a Nirvana to which few can hope to arrive. Against the foil of the butcher-bird's stolidity we may set the inquisitive, garrulous temperament of the white-eyed vireo and the yellow-breasted chat.
Of the interesting and typically North American family of wood warblers I have numbered no fewer than eight which nest in the Park; these are the redstart, the yellow-breasted chat, northern yellow-throat, oven-bird, the yellow warbler, blue-winged, black-and-white creeping warblers, and one other to be mentioned later.
It was my good fortune to find a nest on a copsy hilltop, where the bird's madrigals and lullabies mingled with those of the yellow-breasted chats, the indigo buntings, the blue-gray gnat catchers, and the Kentucky warblers. To this day I feel a longing to visit the secluded spot where I held so many pleasant interviews with these birds.
Presently he rose, kicked the kinks out of his trousers, and walked out into the clear sunlight. At the end of the street he stepped from the side-walk to the sod path and kept walking. He passed an orchard and plucked a ripe peach from an overhanging bough. A yellow-breasted lark stood in a stubble-field, chirped two or three times, and soared, singing, toward the far blue sky.
Next day there is a rumor that somebody has seen a bluebird. In less than three days everybody has seen a bluebird; and favored people have heard a robin or rather the yellow-breasted thrush, misnamed a robin in America. This is no doubt true: for angle-worms have been seen on the surface of the ground; and, wherever there is anything to eat, the robin is promptly on hand.
While my eyes were fixed upon a certain bush before me, the singer incautiously ventured too near the top of a twig, and I saw him plainly, standing almost upright, and vehemently chanting his fantasia, opening his mouth very wide with every call. I knew him at once, the rogue! from having read of him; he was the yellow-breasted chat.
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