Eastern Kingbird

Tyrannus tyrannus

common Least Concern (declining)

Live from the dock

Active 1,795 minutes across 50 days since May 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 9 sec

Anc516 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 11 a.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	39	163	241	150	162	134	78	116	78	72	76	114	186	105	77	3	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-April through August. First heard this year on May 2.

Dock records

First heard: May 2, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 309 minutes on July 23, 2026
Earliest call: 5:47 a.m.
Round-trip migration: 8,217 miles
Days detected: 50 of 95 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Eastern Kingbird at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 11 a.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Eastern Kingbird most often.

What time of year is the Eastern Kingbird at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-April through August. First heard this year on May 2. That window is when the Eastern Kingbird has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Eastern Kingbird been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 1,795 minutes across 50 days since May 2026. Last heard today.

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 eastern kingbird is a large tyrant flycatcher native to the Americas. The bird is predominantly dark gray with white underbelly and pointed wings. Eastern kingbirds are conspicuous and are commonly found in open areas with scattered trees and bushes, where they perch while foraging for insects.

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