While I shot a Slaty Skimmer, the bush trembled with a fluttering, settled, fluttered, then parted. In the sun splash, a smallish bird appeared -- gray wings and head, white underpants, lemon yellow breast. Just as suddenly, he disappeared, whether on wing or by leap I don't know. A vision like a magic trick, unexpected and breathtaking. Friend and blogger David Haskell suggested I saw a Yellow-breasted Chat, described by Cornell's All About Birds as "easily overlooked because of its skulking nature and the density of its bushy haunts."
I rounded the hill to the beach path, where I crouched to shoot a female Calico Pennant just beyond my reach in a thicket of grass and wildflowers. She tempted me to lean further and further in, and I lingered long. In the woods at my back, a deer snorted and choughed, snorted and choughed, moving steadily from my left to my right, warning me that I was invading cervine territory.
The Chat, the doe, and I: fellow skulkers of morning.
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