Cedar Waxwing

Bombycilla cedrorum

Live from the dock

Active 2,845 minutes across 108 days since June 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 14 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Quiet around dawn.

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	2	2	2	0	0	2	36	82	127	163	209	209	226	225	253	129	117	113	138	276	312	155	67

Across the year

Present from late-June through October. First heard this year on June 24.

Dock records

First heard: June 24, 2026
Busiest day: 102 minutes on September 4, 2026
Earliest call: 1:34 a.m.
Days detected: 108 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Cedar Waxwing at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Quiet around dawn. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Cedar Waxwing most often.

What time of year is the Cedar Waxwing at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-June through October. First heard this year on June 24. That window is when the Cedar Waxwing has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Cedar Waxwing been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 2,845 minutes across 108 days since June 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.

About the bird

The cedar waxwing is a member of the family Bombycillidae or waxwing family of passerine birds. It is a medium-sized bird that is mainly brown, gray, and yellow. Some of the wing feathers have red tips, which resemble sealing wax, giving the bird its common name.

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 Read more on Wikipedia →