All,
      Karen and I birded the Eastern Neck NWR on Sunday in preparation for a bird walk that we are going to lead at the conference in a couple of weeks. We came across a Chat with an orange breast on the Duck Inn trail. I emailed the photo to Walter Ellison and he had the following info about the bird.
 
"Yellow, orange, and red coloration is strongly influenced by diet. Orange variants seem to be caused by recently introduced invasive fruiting plants, especially Tatarian honeysuckle (possibly Amur honeysuckle as well). The lack of white in the malar is variable in chats, females rarely show it and many males lack it. The brownish cast to the upperparts looks to me like an artifact of lighting. There's a good illustration of an orange-breasted chat in Dunn and Garrett's Peterson guide to warblers.  The bird is at, or close to, the extreme for orange underparts."
 
      A photo of the bird can be found on the Howard County website photo pages at 

http://www.howardbirds.org/photo_page/member_photos/YellowbreastedChat.htm
 
 
Kevin Heffernan
Ellicott City