Magnolia Warbler

Setophaga magnolia

Live from the dock

Active 220 minutes across 13 days since September 2026. Last heard on October 4.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 92 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

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	0	19	45	13	23	35	3	2	16	13	7	11	15	18	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-September through September. First heard this year on September 22.

Dock records

First heard: September 22, 2026
Busiest day: 42 minutes on September 26, 2026
Earliest call: 7:21 a.m.
Days detected: 13 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Magnolia Warbler doesn't come through much. 13 of the 183 days we've been listening, 220 minutes active total, #51 of the 107 species we've caught.

The busiest month was September, with 190 minutes active. Nothing at all in May, June, July, August and November. Best single day so far was September 26, 2026, 42 minutes active. We started listening on May 2, 2026, so there's nothing for December through April yet.

Magnolia Warbler 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	9 of 30	190
October 2026	4 of 31	30
November 2026	0 of 10	0

No real morning or evening lean on this one. The busiest hour is 8 a.m., with 20% of its minutes. Earliest so far: 7:21 a.m.

We haven't heard one since October 4, 2026, 37 days ago.

Heard alongside

Birds that keep turning up in the same hours as the Magnolia Warbler. We pick them by overlap, so a bird that's around all day doesn't make the list just by being everywhere.

Brown Thrasher: 32 of those 68 hours.
Northern Flicker: 27 of those 68 hours.
Pileated Woodpecker: 14 of those 68 hours.
White-eyed Vireo: 14 of those 68 hours.
Rose-breasted Grosbeak: 8 of those 68 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Magnolia Warbler 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 Magnolia Warbler most often.

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

Present from late-September through September. First heard this year on September 22. That window is when the Magnolia Warbler has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Magnolia Warbler been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 220 minutes across 13 days since September 2026. Last heard on October 4.

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.