Eastern Phoebe

Sayornis phoebe

Live from the dock

Active 818 minutes across 78 days since June 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 18 sec

Jonathon Jongsma 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	0	16	127	129	136	79	42	49	14	34	15	34	68	46	21	6	2	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-June through October. First heard this year on June 9.

Dock records

First heard: June 9, 2026
Busiest day: 72 minutes on October 14, 2026
Earliest call: 6:24 a.m.
Days detected: 78 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Eastern Phoebe 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 Phoebe most often.

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

Present from early-June through October. First heard this year on June 9. That window is when the Eastern Phoebe has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Eastern Phoebe been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 818 minutes across 78 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 eastern phoebe is a small passerine bird. The genus name Sayornis is constructed from the specific part of Charles Lucien Bonaparte's name for Say's phoebe, Muscicapa saya, and Ancient Greek ornis, "bird". Phoebe is an alternative name for the Roman moon-goddess Diana, but it may also have been chosen to imitate the bird's call.

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