Yellow Chats like wet places - low vegetation bordering swamps, floodplains, boredrains, saltpans and sewage ponds are all good examples. The provision of boredrains to water cattle have allowed Yellow Chats to spread widely through the arid inland of northern Australia and in these areas they tend to be nomadic, their presence dictated by the presence or absence of suitable vegetation along the drains. In recent years, there has been a move to cap these bores and pipe the water underground, both to conserve water from evaporation and also to control a major weed, prickly Acacia. Bad news for Yellow Chats, but there are still a number of natural wetlands out in these areas for them to retreat to.

Yellow Chats are also known to occur in coastal regions where the wetlands tend to be permanent and in those areas, the birds appear to be resident or to move only locally. Near Broome in W.A. on Roebuck Plains, they occur in saline grassland and on the Alligator River floodplain where I took some of these pictures, they inhabited a reedbed which actually became flooded by very high tides. In recent times another population has been found and studied in samphire just south of Rockampton in Queensland and on nearby Curtis Island.