Prothonotary Warbler

Protonotaria citrea

uncommon Least Concern (declining)

Live from the dock

Active 1,315 minutes across 43 days since May 2026. Last heard 2 days ago.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 17 sec

Tom Austin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 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	56	355	118	133	163	113	73	100	77	27	16	15	42	11	11	5	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-May through July. First heard this year on May 29.

Dock records

First heard: May 29, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 213 minutes on July 3, 2026
Earliest call: 5:46 a.m.
Days detected: 43 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Prothonotary Warbler at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 a.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Prothonotary Warbler most often.

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

Present from late-May through July. First heard this year on May 29. That window is when the Prothonotary Warbler has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Prothonotary Warbler been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 1,315 minutes across 43 days since May 2026. Last heard 2 days ago.

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 prothonotary warbler is a small songbird of the New World warbler family. It is named for its plumage, which resembles the yellow robes once worn by papal clerks in the Roman Catholic Church.

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