Northern Mockingbird

Mimus polyglottos

common Least Concern

Live from the dock

Active 2,768 minutes across 93 days since May 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 122 sec

ZooFari 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.

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	1	0	0	0	0	2	243	359	226	182	213	213	149	134	141	84	115	123	133	151	221	78	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-May through October. First heard this year on May 31.

Dock records

First heard: May 31, 2026
Busiest day: 160 minutes on July 8, 2026
Earliest call: 12:29 a.m.
Days detected: 93 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Northern Mockingbird at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Northern Mockingbird most often.

What time of year is the Northern Mockingbird at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-May through October. First heard this year on May 31. That window is when the Northern Mockingbird has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Northern Mockingbird been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 2,768 minutes across 93 days since May 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 northern mockingbird is a mockingbird commonly found in North America, of the family Mimidae. The species is also found in some parts of the Caribbean, as well as on the Hawaiian Islands.

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