Eastern Wood-Pewee

Contopus virens

Live from the dock

Active 1,029 minutes across 65 days since May 2026. Last heard on October 4.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 99 sec

No machine-readable author provided. Mdf assumed (based on copyright claims). 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	7	76	116	82	100	67	53	54	52	53	66	74	86	110	27	5	0	0

Across the year

Present from mid-May through September. First heard this year on May 12.

Dock records

First heard: May 12, 2026
Busiest day: 65 minutes on September 7, 2026
Earliest call: 5:13 a.m.
Days detected: 65 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Eastern Wood-Pewee 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 Wood-Pewee most often.

What time of year is the Eastern Wood-Pewee at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from mid-May through September. First heard this year on May 12. That window is when the Eastern Wood-Pewee has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Eastern Wood-Pewee been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 1,029 minutes across 65 days since May 2026. Last heard on October 4.

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 wood pewee is a small tyrant flycatcher from North, Central and South America. This bird and the western wood pewee were formerly considered a single species. The two species are virtually identical in appearance, and can be distinguished most easily by their calls.

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