Purple Martin

Progne subis

Live from the dock

Active 667 minutes across 69 days since May 2026. Last heard on August 16.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 25 sec

No machine-readable author provided. Mdf assumed (based on copyright claims). via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

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	47	64	38	37	45	43	26	29	37	50	60	50	51	29	21	37	3	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-May through August. First heard this year on May 30.

Dock records

First heard: May 30, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 45 minutes on July 6, 2026
Earliest call: 5:25 a.m.
Days detected: 69 of 109 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Purple Martin 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 Purple Martin most often.

What time of year is the Purple Martin at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-May through August. First heard this year on May 30. That window is when the Purple Martin has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Purple Martin been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 667 minutes across 69 days since May 2026. Last heard on August 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.

About the bird

The purple martin is a passerine bird in the swallow family Hirundinidae. It is the largest swallow in North America. Despite its name, the purple martin is not truly purple.

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