Northern Cardinal

Cardinalis cardinalis

common Least Concern

Live from the dock

Active 2,576 minutes across 68 days since May 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 25 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	28	296	330	252	260	197	171	135	159	132	62	103	92	97	105	124	31	2	0

Across the year

Present from late-April through July. First heard this year on May 2.

Dock records

First heard: May 9, 2026
Busiest day: 204 minutes on July 6, 2026
Earliest call: 5:12 a.m.
Days detected: 68 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Northern Cardinal 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 Northern Cardinal most often.

What time of year is the Northern Cardinal at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-April through July. First heard this year on May 2. That window is when the Northern Cardinal has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Northern Cardinal been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 2,576 minutes across 68 days since May 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.

About the bird

The northern cardinal, also commonly known as the common cardinal, red cardinal, or simply cardinal, is a bird in the genus Cardinalis. It can be found in southeastern Canada, through the eastern United States from Maine to Minnesota to Texas, New Mexico, southern Arizona, southern California and south through Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala.

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