Golden-crowned Kinglet

Regulus satrapa

Live from the dock

Active 1,075 minutes across 41 days since September 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 91 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	1	0	0	30	92	139	115	110	125	115	110	88	51	69	25	5	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from mid-September through November. First heard this year on September 14.

Dock records

First heard: September 14, 2026
Busiest day: 80 minutes on October 25, 2026
Earliest call: 3:09 a.m.
Days detected: 41 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

Some days yes, most days no. The Golden-crowned Kinglet is on 41 of 183 days in the recordings (22%), with 1,075 minutes active, #24 of 107.

The busiest month was October, with 588 minutes active. Nothing at all in May, June, July and August. Best single day so far was October 25, 2026, 80 minutes active. The recordings only go back to May 2, 2026, so we've got nothing for December through April yet.

Golden-crowned Kinglet by month at the dock
Month	Days heard	Minutes active
May 2026	0 of 20	0
June 2026	0 of 30	0
July 2026	0 of 31	0
August 2026	0 of 31	0
September 2026	7 of 30	28
October 2026	24 of 31	588
November 2026	10 of 10	459

We don't see much of an early or late pattern. The top hour so far is 8 a.m. at 13% of its minutes. Earliest so far: 3:09 a.m.

It's been around more lately, 30 of the last 30 days, up from 7% of days before that.

Heard alongside

Out of the 249 hours we've had the Golden-crowned Kinglet on the mics, these birds turned up in the same hours the most. We pick them by how much their hours overlap.

White-throated Sparrow: in 156 of the 249 hours.
Northern Flicker: in 151 of the 249 hours.
Yellow-rumped Warbler: in 128 of the 249 hours.
Winter Wren: in 105 of the 249 hours.
Eastern Towhee: in 77 of the 249 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Golden-crowned Kinglet 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 Golden-crowned Kinglet most often.

What time of year is the Golden-crowned Kinglet at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from mid-September through November. First heard this year on September 14. That window is when the Golden-crowned Kinglet has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Golden-crowned Kinglet been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 1,075 minutes across 41 days since September 2026. Last heard today.

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.