Rose-breasted Grosbeak

Pheucticus ludovicianus

Live from the dock

Active 50 minutes across 8 days since September 2026. Last heard on October 4.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 90 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	0	0	5	18	6	12	1	0	5	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-September through September. First heard this year on September 22.

Dock records

First heard: September 22, 2026
Busiest day: 14 minutes on September 29, 2026
Earliest call: 7:25 a.m.
Days detected: 8 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

Not a lot of data on this one, 8 of 183 days. Here's the full list:

September 22, 2026: 6 minutes active, first call at 8:22 a.m.
September 26, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 9:37 a.m.
September 27, 2026: 4 minutes active, first call at 7:46 a.m.
September 29, 2026: 14 minutes active, first call at 7:25 a.m.
September 30, 2026: 4 minutes active, first call at 10:53 a.m.
October 2, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 8:48 a.m.
October 3, 2026: 5 minutes active, first call at 11:54 a.m.
October 4, 2026: 11 minutes active, first call at 7:50 a.m.

Last one was October 4, 2026, and nothing in the 37 days since. If it comes through again it'll show up here on the next update.

Heard alongside

Birds that keep turning up in the same hours as the Rose-breasted Grosbeak. We pick them by overlap, so a bird that's around all day doesn't make the list just by being everywhere.

Brown Thrasher: in 17 of the 21 hours.
Northern Flicker: in 15 of the 21 hours.
Magnolia Warbler: in 8 of the 21 hours.
Pileated Woodpecker: in 6 of the 21 hours.
Bald Eagle: in 2 of the 21 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Rose-breasted Grosbeak 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 Rose-breasted Grosbeak most often.

What time of year is the Rose-breasted Grosbeak at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-September through September. First heard this year on September 22. That window is when the Rose-breasted Grosbeak has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Rose-breasted Grosbeak been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 50 minutes across 8 days since September 2026. Last heard on October 4.

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 rose-breasted grosbeak, colloquially called "cut-throat" due to its coloration, is a large, seed-eating grosbeak in the cardinal family. It is primarily a foliage gleaner. Males have black heads, wings, backs, and tails, and a bright rose colored patch on their white breast.

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