The yellow-breasted chat (Icteria virens) is a large songbird in its own family, Icteriidae, that is found in North and Central America. It was once placed in the New World warbler family Parulidae and is occasionally placed in the similarly named New World blackbird family, Icteridae.
Taxonomy
The yellow-breasted chat was formally described in 1758 by Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with the thrushes in the genus Turdus, coined the binomial name Turdus virens, and specified the type locality as "America". The specific epithet is Latin meaning 'green'. The locality has been restricted to South Carolina. Linnaeus based his account on the "yellow brested chat" that had been described and illustrated by the English naturalist Mark Catesby in his book The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. It is now the only species placed in the genus Icteria that was introduced in 1808 by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot. It is also the only species placed in the family Icteriidae that was introduced (as Icterieae) in 1858 by the American naturalist Spencer Baird.
The yellow-breasted chat was formerly considered the largest member of the family Parulidae, but following taxonomic studies, it was moved to the monotypic family Icteriidae in 2017. Although the Icteriidae are a distinct family from the New World blackbirds (Icteridae), which have a very similar name, taxonomic studies support them as being the closest living relatives of one another, and in a 2019 study, which actually classified the yellow-breasted chat as a member of the Icteridae. In addition, the former grouping of the yellow-breasted chat as a warbler was not too far off because phylogenomic studies have placed the Parulidae as sister to a clade that includes the Icteridae. Those results make it reasonable to view the Parulidae as the sister group to the clade comprising the Icteridae and Icteriidae.
