Prothonotary Warbler

Protonotaria citrea

uncommon Least Concern (declining)

Live from the dock

Active 1,056 minutes across 48 days since May 2026. Last heard on July 26.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 17 sec

Tom Austin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 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	55	277	117	93	120	74	71	56	72	23	16	15	39	12	11	5	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-May through July. First heard this year on May 5.

Dock records

First heard: May 5, 2026
Busiest day: 91 minutes on July 3, 2026
Earliest call: 5:46 a.m.
Days detected: 48 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Prothonotary Warbler at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 a.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Prothonotary Warbler most often.

What time of year is the Prothonotary Warbler at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-May through July. First heard this year on May 5. That window is when the Prothonotary Warbler has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Prothonotary Warbler been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 1,056 minutes across 48 days since May 2026. Last heard on July 26.

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 prothonotary warbler is a small songbird of the New World warbler family. It is named for its plumage, which resembles the yellow robes once worn by papal clerks in the Roman Catholic Church.

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