Rusty Blackbird

Euphagus carolinus

Live from the dock

Active 27 minutes across 6 days since October 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 39 sec

Jim Berry via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.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	1	5	1	2	12	1	0	1	2	2	0	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from mid-October through November. First heard this year on October 24.

Dock records

First heard: October 24, 2026
Busiest day: 12 minutes on November 9, 2026
Earliest call: 8:59 a.m.
Days detected: 6 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Rusty Blackbird has only turned up on 6 of the 183 days we've been recording, so this is a short page. Every day it's on:

October 24, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 5:17 p.m.
October 25, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 9:40 a.m.
October 26, 2026: 6 minutes active, first call at 8:59 a.m.
October 28, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 9:35 a.m.
October 30, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 11:59 a.m.
November 9, 2026: 12 minutes active, first call at 11:23 a.m.

If the mics catch it again, that day gets added to this list.

Heard alongside

Out of the 16 hours we've had the Rusty Blackbird on the mics, these birds turned up in the same hours the most. We pick them by how much their hours overlap.

White-throated Sparrow: in 14 of the 16 hours.
Song Sparrow: in 8 of the 16 hours.
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker: in 4 of the 16 hours.
Ruby-crowned Kinglet: in 3 of the 16 hours.
Greater Yellowlegs: in 2 of the 16 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Rusty Blackbird at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Rusty Blackbird most often.

What time of year is the Rusty Blackbird at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from mid-October through November. First heard this year on October 24. That window is when the Rusty Blackbird has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Rusty Blackbird been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 27 minutes across 6 days since October 2026. Last heard yesterday.

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 rusty blackbird is a medium-sized New World blackbird, closely related to grackles. It is a bird that prefers wet forested areas, breeding in the boreal forest and muskeg across northern Canada, and migrating southeast to the United States during winter.

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