Palm Warbler

Setophaga palmarum

Live from the dock

Active 42 minutes across 10 days since August 2026. Last heard on October 16.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 2 sec

Jonathon Jongsma 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	0	0	6	5	4	3	2	5	3	1	2	4	5	1	0	1	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-August through October. First heard this year on August 27.

Dock records

First heard: August 27, 2026
Busiest day: 11 minutes on October 11, 2026
Earliest call: 8:13 a.m.
Days detected: 10 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Palm Warbler doesn't come through much. 10 of the 183 days we've been listening, 42 minutes active total, #72 of the 107 species we've caught.

October has been its big month so far, 38 minutes active. We didn't hear it once in May, June, July, September and November. Best single day so far was October 11, 2026, 11 minutes active. Keep in mind the mics only went live on May 2, 2026, so we don't have December through April yet.

Palm 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	2 of 31	4
September 2026	0 of 30	0
October 2026	8 of 31	38
November 2026	0 of 10	0

It doesn't lean early or late. Its top hour is 8 a.m., 14% of the total. The earliest call on record is 8:13 a.m.

We haven't heard one since October 16, 2026, 25 days ago.

Heard alongside

These are the birds we hear most in the same hours as the Palm Warbler. An hour counts as shared when the mics pick up both in it, and we pick the list by how much their hours overlap.

Northern Flicker: 16 of those 29 hours.
Brown Thrasher: 14 of those 29 hours.
Red-tailed Hawk: 7 of those 29 hours.
Yellow-rumped Warbler: 6 of those 29 hours.
Dunlin: 5 of those 29 hours.

Common questions

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

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

Present from late-August through October. First heard this year on August 27. That window is when the Palm Warbler has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Palm Warbler been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 42 minutes across 10 days since August 2026. Last heard on October 16.

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.