Yellow-rumped Warbler

Setophaga coronata

Live from the dock

Active 721 minutes across 32 days since September 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 4 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	1	0	0	2	53	111	111	76	80	59	63	65	41	36	14	5	2	1	1	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-September through November. First heard this year on September 30.

Dock records

First heard: September 30, 2026
Busiest day: 71 minutes on October 23, 2026
Earliest call: 3:56 a.m.
Days detected: 32 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Yellow-rumped Warbler is more of a now-and-then bird for us. It's turned up on 32 of the 183 days we've been listening, 721 minutes active in total, which is #33 of 107.

It peaked in October at 569 minutes active. We didn't hear it once in May, June, July and August. The record day is October 23, 2026 with 71 minutes active. We started listening on May 2, 2026, so there's nothing for December through April yet.

Yellow-rumped Warbler by month at the dock
Month	Days heard	Minutes active
May 2026	0 of 20	0
June 2026	0 of 30	0
July 2026	0 of 31	0
August 2026	0 of 31	0
September 2026	1 of 30	2
October 2026	23 of 31	569
November 2026	8 of 10	150

No real morning or evening lean on this one. The busiest hour is 8 a.m., with 15% of its minutes. Earliest we've caught one is 3:56 a.m.

We're hearing it a lot more lately. It's been on 93% of the last 30 days, compared with 3% before that.

Heard alongside

These are the birds we hear most in the same hours as the Yellow-rumped Warbler. An hour counts as shared when the mics pick up both in it, and we pick the list by how much their hours overlap.

Northern Flicker: 131 of those 187 hours.
Golden-crowned Kinglet: 128 of those 187 hours.
White-throated Sparrow: 126 of those 187 hours.
Winter Wren: 84 of those 187 hours.
Eastern Towhee: 69 of those 187 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Yellow-rumped Warbler 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 Yellow-rumped Warbler most often.

What time of year is the Yellow-rumped Warbler at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-September through November. First heard this year on September 30. That window is when the Yellow-rumped Warbler has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Yellow-rumped Warbler been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 721 minutes across 32 days since September 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.