Great Crested Flycatcher

Myiarchus crinitus

common Least Concern

Live from the dock

Active 1,143 minutes across 64 days since May 2026. Last heard on August 30.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 26 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	84	195	164	101	89	39	74	52	58	45	24	67	49	61	41	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-May through August. First heard this year on May 4.

Dock records

First heard: May 4, 2026
Busiest day: 121 minutes on July 6, 2026
Earliest call: 6:11 a.m.
Round-trip migration: 5,010 miles
Days detected: 64 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Great Crested Flycatcher 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 Great Crested Flycatcher most often.

What time of year is the Great Crested Flycatcher at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-May through August. First heard this year on May 4. That window is when the Great Crested Flycatcher has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Great Crested Flycatcher been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 1,143 minutes across 64 days since May 2026. Last heard on August 30.

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 great crested flycatcher is a large insect-eating bird of the tyrant flycatcher family. It is the most widespread member of the genus Myiarchus in North America, and is found over most of the eastern and mid-western portions of the continent. It dwells mostly in the treetops and rarely is found on the ground.

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