Chimney Swift

Chaetura pelagica

Live from the dock

Active 212 minutes across 45 days since May 2026. Last heard on October 1.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 19 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

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	0	4	9	12	16	19	22	12	6	10	8	19	19	15	28	11	2	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-May through September. First heard this year on May 9.

Dock records

First heard: May 9, 2026
Busiest day: 33 minutes on July 24, 2026
Earliest call: 6:35 a.m.
Days detected: 45 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Chimney Swift 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 Chimney Swift most often.

What time of year is the Chimney Swift at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-May through September. First heard this year on May 9. That window is when the Chimney Swift has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Chimney Swift been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 212 minutes across 45 days since May 2026. Last heard on October 1.

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 chimney swift is a bird belonging to the swift family Apodidae. A member of the genus Chaetura, it is closely related to both Vaux's swift and Chapman's swift; in the past, the three were sometimes considered to be conspecific. It has no subspecies.

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