Eastern Kingbird song and call

An Eastern Kingbird sounds like an electric fence with opinions: a sharp, high, buzzy dzee or dzeet, unmusical and insistent, and bursts of fast, harsh stuttering, kit-kit-kitter-kitter, tzeee, given from a fence wire, a treetop or a power line over open fields and water. There is no sweet song. What the kingbird has instead is a nervous, sputtering chatter that gets faster and louder whenever a crow, a hawk or another kingbird comes near.

What the song sounds like

Kingbirds are flycatchers, and flycatchers do not have much of a song. The everyday sound is a run of sharp, high, buzzy notes, each a little like a spark: kip, kitter, dzeet, tzeee, strung into a rapid, stuttering chatter that rises and falls in intensity. The comparison people reach for is an electric fence, and it is accurate: the notes are dry, unmusical and slightly metallic.

There is a real song, but it belongs to the dark. In the hours before dawn, especially where several pairs nest close together, males give a longer, more complex song that most people never hear. Courting males add a display flight of rapid up-and-down movements, zigzags and backward somersaults, calling as they go.

The call: dzeet, and the sound of a fight

The single call is a sharp dzee or dzeet, buzzy and high, given between mates and at anything the bird dislikes. Kingbirds are famously intolerant. A pair will rise to meet a crow, a jay or a hawk passing over the territory, chattering harshly and diving at it with the crest raised to show a red crown patch and the mouth open to show a red gape. If you hear a frantic sputtering over a field and look up, you will often find a kingbird escorting a much larger bird off the property.

When and where you hear it

Eastern Kingbirds breed across most of North America east of the Rockies and well beyond, from the Gulf Coast through central Canada and northwest to British Columbia and the Yukon, with the range thinning across the arid Southwest. They want open country with scattered trees and something to perch on: pastures, orchards, shelterbelts, roadsides, marsh edges, river groves and parks, very often near water. They nest in a tree or shrub, sometimes on a post or pole.

In Missouri they arrive in the second half of April and leave between mid August and early September, common statewide. The nest is a bulky, sturdy cup of twigs, grass, bark and rootlets, sometimes with bits of trash woven in, placed seven to thirty feet up, and the female incubates three or four eggs for fourteen to eighteen days. The young fly at about sixteen or seventeen days and are fed for another month; there is one brood a year unless the first fails.

The winter is the surprise. Kingbirds leave in flocks, traveling by day, and spend the off-season in South America, mainly the western Amazon basin, where the fierce, solitary insect hawk of a Kansas pasture becomes a sociable fruit-eater moving through the forest in flocks that can number in the thousands. In summer, insects make up about 85 percent of the diet, bees, wasps, beetles, grasshoppers, bugs and flies, mostly caught in the air from a perch. The population, about 26 million, has been slipping since the 1960s, roughly 40 percent in Missouri, blamed on habitat loss, insecticides and cars.

What it looks like

A medium-sized, upright flycatcher, seven and a half to nine inches long with a thirteen to fifteen inch wingspan, that looks like it is wearing a dark suit: black head, slate-gray back, clean white underparts with a faint gray band across the chest, and a black tail with a crisp white band across the tip, the single best field mark. The crown hides a patch of red, orange or yellow feathers that almost never shows except in a fight. Males and females look alike; young birds are browner with a narrower tail band. The scientific name, Tyrannus tyrannus, the tyrant of tyrants, was earned honestly.

Birds that sound similar

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  Great Crested Flycatcher

  The Great Crested Flycatcher whistles a loud, clear, rising wheep from inside the woods, and a rolling prrreet. A kingbird never whistles; its notes are buzzy sparks and stutters from a perch over open ground.

• 
  Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

  The scissor-tail's call is a harsh kee-kee-kee-kee, and its chattering notes sound much like a kingbird's. On the southern Plains where both nest, wait for the bird to fly: the streaming tail settles it.

• ?
  Western Kingbird

  The Western Kingbird's call is a loud, sharp kit and a similar chatter, so on the Plains, where the two overlap, go by sight: the Eastern is white below with a white-tipped black tail.

Where the Eastern Kingbird card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Eastern Kingbird appears in 39 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated September 30, 2026.