Yellow-billed Cuckoo

Coccyzus americanus

Live from the dock

Active 473 minutes across 29 days since June 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 21 sec

Jonathon Jongsma 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	1	1	3	120	108	70	32	23	10	18	13	12	13	2	8	4	20	15	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-June through July. First heard this year on June 5.

Dock records

First heard: June 5, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 73 minutes on July 14, 2026
Earliest call: 3:01 a.m.
Days detected: 29 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Yellow-billed Cuckoo 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 Yellow-billed Cuckoo most often.

What time of year is the Yellow-billed Cuckoo at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-June through July. First heard this year on June 5. That window is when the Yellow-billed Cuckoo has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Yellow-billed Cuckoo been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 473 minutes across 29 days since June 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 yellow-billed cuckoo is a member of the cuckoo family. Common folk names for this bird in the southern United States are rain crow and storm crow. These likely refer to the bird's habit of calling on hot days, often presaging rain showers or thunderstorms.

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