Summer Tanager

Piranga rubra

common Least Concern

Live from the dock

Active 823 minutes across 85 days since May 2026. Last heard on September 27.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 39 sec

Niels Krabbe via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

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	70	126	153	121	81	48	28	19	20	19	30	31	34	31	12	0	0	0

Across the year

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

Dock records

First heard: May 5, 2026
Busiest day: 51 minutes on May 24, 2026
Earliest call: 6:03 a.m.
Days detected: 85 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Summer Tanager 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 Summer Tanager most often.

What time of year is the Summer Tanager at Watts Bar Lake?

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

Has the Summer Tanager been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 823 minutes across 85 days since May 2026. Last heard on September 27.

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 summer tanager is a medium-sized American songbird. Formerly placed in the tanager family, it and other members of its genus are now classified in the cardinal family. The species's plumage and vocalizations are similar to other members of the cardinal family.

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