Ruby-throated Hummingbird

Archilochus colubris

Live from the dock

Active 609 minutes across 14 days since July 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 3 sec

Unknown authorUnknown author via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

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	58	76	73	61	53	48	35	26	15	23	20	17	37	31	30	6	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-July through July. First heard this year on July 6.

Dock records

First heard: July 6, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 111 minutes on July 18, 2026
Earliest call: 6:17 a.m.
Days detected: 14 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Ruby-throated Hummingbird 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 Ruby-throated Hummingbird most often.

What time of year is the Ruby-throated Hummingbird at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-July through July. First heard this year on July 6. That window is when the Ruby-throated Hummingbird has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Ruby-throated Hummingbird been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 609 minutes across 14 days since July 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 ruby-throated hummingbird is a species of hummingbird that generally spends the winter in Central America, Mexico, and Florida, and migrates to Canada and other parts of Eastern North America for the summer to breed. It is the most common hummingbird in eastern North America, having population estimates of about 35 million in 2021.

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