Belted Kingfisher

Megaceryle alcyon

Live from the dock

Active 1,439 minutes across 108 days since May 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 5 sec

Unknown authorUnknown author via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

When you'll hear it

Most often heard in the evening, 5 to 9 p.m. Quiet overnight.

Minutes active by hour, as a table

Minutes active by hour of day
	12 AM	1 AM	2 AM	3 AM	4 AM	5 AM	6 AM	7 AM	8 AM	9 AM	10 AM	11 AM	NOON	1 PM	2 PM	3 PM	4 PM	5 PM	6 PM	7 PM	8 PM	9 PM	10 PM	11 PM
Minutes active	0	0	0	0	0	1	50	217	159	91	54	37	41	36	20	56	74	126	185	219	71	2	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-May through October. First heard this year on May 29.

Dock records

First heard: May 29, 2026
Busiest day: 56 minutes on October 12, 2026
Earliest call: 5:54 a.m.
Days detected: 108 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Belted Kingfisher at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard in the evening, 5 to 9 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Belted Kingfisher most often.

What time of year is the Belted Kingfisher at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-May through October. First heard this year on May 29. That window is when the Belted Kingfisher has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Belted Kingfisher been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 1,439 minutes across 108 days since May 2026. Last heard yesterday.

How these counts work

5 microphones listen from the dock, day and night. They only count birds from a fixed regional list of 226 species, so a bird that cannot occur here is never added by mistake. Every species has its own confidence bar, and that bar rises when the wind picks up and the audio gets noisy. A bird is not counted until it turns up again across several short listening windows that together cover at least ten minutes. Because the bar sits that high, when this page calls a bird rare, it really is rare.

All of the microphones sit at one spot, our dock, so these counts describe what is audible from that shoreline, not the whole lake. A bird that stays quiet here, or sings out of earshot, can be nearby and still never reach the numbers.

These records are generated automatically from the audio, and no person reviews them one by one. The software is not perfect and sometimes tags the wrong bird, most often on a faint or distant call. Read each as a bird the microphones detected, not a sighting someone checked by hand.