Arroyo Burro Open Space Restoration Pays off Dividends for Santa Barbara Bird Population 

Back in mid-May, Libby Patten was excited to hear the song of a yellow-breasted chat coming from dense vegetation at the newly restored Arroyo Burro Open Space. Knowing that it would be unusual for the bird to stick around past the normal migration window, and even more unusual for it to find a mate and attempt to nest, she kept tabs on the bird as it continued to sing into June. As a breeding species, the chat has declined greatly in Santa Barbara County and throughout most of Southern California since the early 1900s, probably due to loss of habitat, and is now found very locally during the summer, and almost never on the coastal plain along the south coast of our county.

The chat has long been a taxonomists’ mystery. For many years it was regarded as a type of warbler. Its bright yellow chest and olive back certainly give it a warbler-like appearance, but it is considerably larger than any warbler, approaching a thrush in size. The song is also most decidedly un-warbler-like. Most North American Warblers have simple repetitive songs, but not so the chat! The Cornell Lab describes it: “the chat offers a cascade of song in the spring, when males deliver streams of whistles, cackles, chuckles, and gurgles with the fluidity of improvisational jazz.”

It’s a loud bird.