Indigo Bunting

Passerina cyanea

Live from the dock

Active 555 minutes across 21 days since July 2026. Last heard on August 3.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 224 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 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	13	21	52	52	58	54	97	49	48	25	41	29	12	2	2	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-July through August. First heard this year on July 6.

Dock records

First heard: July 6, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 120 minutes on July 19, 2026
Earliest call: 6:29 a.m.
Days detected: 21 of 95 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Indigo Bunting at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Indigo Bunting most often.

What time of year is the Indigo Bunting at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-July through August. First heard this year on July 6. That window is when the Indigo Bunting has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Indigo Bunting been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 555 minutes across 21 days since July 2026. Last heard on August 3.

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 indigo bunting is a small seed-eating bird in the cardinal family, Cardinalidae. It is migratory, ranging from southern Canada to northern Florida during the breeding season, and from southern Florida to northern South America during the winter. It often migrates by night, using the stars to navigate.

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