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Bird of the Month Last month this column reviewed the fourth of our four first-record species from this past spring. This month we will review a second-record species from this spring, the Yellow-breasted Chat. The Yellow-breasted Chat is olive-green above with a bright yellow breast, gray face, and white mustache stripe and eye ring that connects to the bill, forming "spectacles." Chats forage mainly on spiders and insects they glean from foliage in dense thickets and they also eat fruits and berries. The male's long, distinctive song is made up of whistles, cackles, mews, catcalls, chuckles, rattles, squawks, gurgles, and pops, which they repeat and string together with great variety. Yellow-breasted Chats breed across almost the entire continental US and in south- central Canada and northwestern Mexico. In the arid West they breed in riparian habitats along streams (like our habitat along Potrero Creek). They spend the winter from central Mexico to Panama. In our area, Yellow- breasted Chats breed in nearby riparian habitats, for example Big Morongo and San Timoteo canyons. There are two records for Yellow-breasted Chat at Four Seasons, a bird heard and seen by Marcy and me in April 2016 and a bird heard by Genie and Bill Cooper and me on May 10-11 of 2022; both sightings were in the riparian growth along Potrero Creek. Hopefully someday Yellow- breasted Chats will breed in our maturing riparian habitat. ~ Steve Edelman, steve.h.edelman@gmail.com Birding CLUB During August, our breeders were fledging young and the first movements of fall migration brought a few surprises to our otherwise dependable group of summer breeding species. Newly fledged Song Sparrows, Spotted Towhees, and Lesser Goldfinches, with their disheveled and oddly colored plumage, have been common around Four Seasons. On the migration front, on Aug. 14, a juvenile Black- headed Grosbeak was at my feeder, and on Aug. 18 I got a quick look at a warbler that was either a McGillivray's or Nashville on Trail B; all three of these species breed in our local mountains and will be south of the border by October. Mountain Chickadees continued through the summer at Four Seasons and are still around as of this writing (Sept. 7). Mountain Chickadees breed in our local mountains and move down during the winter. Several are present every winter at Four Seasons, but this year, rather than moving back upslope in May, several of "our" chickadees stayed the summer and may have bred. FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | OCTOBER 2022 39 Yellow-breasted Chat like the one heard in the dense riparian growth along Potrero Creek (Trails A and B) on May 10-11. Photo by Suzanne Forster Adult Song Sparrow photographed earlier this year by Club member John Hansen. Song Sparrows are very common everywhere in Four Seasons and many of their fledgling young were seen in August. Mountain Chickadee seen on Trail B during the Birding Club's March 2020 (winter) bird walk. The summer of 2022 is the first summer since I moved here in 2016 that Mountain Chickadees were present during the summer breeding season. Photo by Club member Dave Kettering.

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