The mystery bird, solved

Ever since moving here to our new home, I've heard the calls of a summer bird. It's a cheerful, chatty call, almost like laughter. For a while, sight unseen, I was calling it a yellow-breasted chat (I don't know why I christened it that except its call was decidedly "chatty"), but then I listened to the actual call of a yellow-breasted chat and realized it most certainly wasn't that. Back to square one. What is the mystery bird?

I mean seriously, this is our fourth summer here and I simply couldn't identify the bird, in large part because while its call was widespread, the bird itself was elusive and evaded all attempts to spot (and hopefully photograph it) for purposes of identification.

Then, a couple weeks ago, this mystery bird began "chatting" from the top of a willow tree in our driveway. I snatched up my camera and crept outside, trying to spot it.

I saw it all right, and took lots of photos. The trouble was, the bird was more or less silhouetted against the sky and I couldn't get into a better position to view it more clearly.

I took dozens of photos (literally, I took 51), just hoping to catch one that would be clear enough to identify the bird. At long last, I was able to catch a flash of bright orange. Aha! That's my clue!

The bird finally flew off to a more distant tree...

...at which point I retired indoors and consulted my bird identification books, looking at all the orange birds in our region.

Then I looked up YouTube videos of the calls for each orange bird. Mystery solved! What I've been hearing is a Bullock's Oriole.

And here's the funny thing: Once I had the bird identified, for the next couple of weeks I could hardly step foot outside without seeing it. Or rather, them. There were at least two males which suddenly started hanging around the yard, resulting in several hastily snatched and not-very-good photos.

After all this time, why did it start hanging around the yard now?

And then, boom. As rapidly as they appeared, they disappeared (from the yard), and now I just heard their chatty, cheery call from afar.

But that's okay. The mystery is solved. Apparently we have a lot of Bullock's Orioles in our area.