Mississippi Kite

Ictinia mississippiensis

Live from the dock

Active 4 minutes across 2 days since July 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 37 sec

Brad Banner via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-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	0	1	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-July through July. First heard this year on July 6.

Dock records

First heard: July 6, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 2 minutes on July 6, 2026
Earliest call: 7:53 a.m.
Days detected: 2 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Mississippi Kite 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 Mississippi Kite most often.

What time of year is the Mississippi Kite at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-July through July. First heard this year on July 6. That window is when the Mississippi Kite has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Mississippi Kite been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 4 minutes across 2 days since July 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 Mississippi kite is a small bird of prey in the family Accipitridae. Mississippi kites have narrow, pointed wings and are graceful in flight, often appearing to float in the air. It is common to see several circling in the same area.

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