Golden-crowned Kinglet song and call

A Golden-crowned Kinglet sounds like the faintest thing in the forest: a thin, wiry tsee-tsee-tsee, a few notes on one very high pitch, given constantly by tiny birds working the tops of spruces, hemlocks and pines. The full song starts the same way, climbs and speeds up, then tumbles into a short, lower chatter. The notes sit so high that some people cannot hear them at all.

What the song sounds like

The song opens with the same thin notes as the call, two or three very high tsee or ti notes that rise in pitch and speed up. Then it drops. The ending is a quick tumble of lower, chattery, warbled notes, faintly like a very small wren, and it is the only part of the performance that registers as a song to most human ears.

You hear it mainly on the breeding grounds, in the conifer forests of Alaska and Canada, northern New England, the Appalachians and the western mountains, from May into July. Males sing more than females. The pitch is the catch: a kinglet's alarm call averages nearly 8 kilohertz, near the top of the range most people can hear, and it is common for one person in a group to hear a flock clearly while the person beside them hears nothing. If you suspect kinglets and hear silence, watch the branch tips instead.

The call: see-see-see

The everyday call is a thin, high tsee, usually doubled or tripled into see-see-see, every note on the same pitch. Kinglets travel in loose groups and in mixed flocks with chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers and creepers, and the constant seeping keeps everyone together as the flock drifts through the trees. In winter it is essentially the only sound they make. Listen in the tops of pines and hemlocks, in the planted conifers of cemeteries and parks, and anywhere a chickadee flock is passing through.

When and where you hear it

Golden-crowned Kinglets breed in dense coniferous forest, spruce, fir, hemlock, Douglas-fir and pine, across Alaska and Canada and south through the western mountains and the Appalachians, Most northern birds move south in late fall and return in early spring. They winter across much of the United States, staying farther north than the Ruby-crowned Kinglet and getting through cold nights by huddling together, two to four birds in a tight roost.

In Missouri they show up in late September and are gone by the end of April, common statewide on migration and more likely to winter in the southern half of the state. They forage from the treetops to dead leaves on the ground, hanging upside down from twig tips and hovering to pick something off a needle.

The nest is a deep hanging cup built by the female, six to sixty feet up in a conifer and usually around fifty, made of moss, lichen, bark and spider silk and lined with feathers. For a bird this small the clutch is enormous, eight or nine eggs and up to eleven, incubated about two weeks, and many pairs raise two broods. The population is around 140 million and considered secure, though hard winters knock local numbers down.

What it looks like

One of the smallest songbirds in North America: three and a half to four inches long and about six grams, less than a quarter of an ounce. Olive gray above, whitish below, with two white wing bars, a short notched tail and a needle of a bill. The head is the giveaway. A black cap holds a yellow center, bright orange in the middle on males, and a white eyebrow sits over a black line through the eye, so the face looks striped. There is no white eye ring, which separates it from the Ruby-crowned Kinglet's bare face and broken ring. Kinglets never sit still: they flick their wings, hover at branch tips and hang from cones. The name comes from the Latin for a little king, for the crown, which a male raises when agitated.

Birds that sound similar

• 
  Brown Creeper

  The creeper's call is a single high, lisping tsee at nearly the same pitch, but it comes from a bird spiraling up a trunk, and its song is a tinkling warble that falls rather than a rising run that tumbles.

• ?
  Ruby-crowned Kinglet

  The ruby-crown's song is a loud, excited, musical chatter, far bigger than the bird and easy to hear. The golden-crown stays thin and high throughout, with only a brief chatter at the end.

• 
  Cedar Waxwing

  Waxwings give a high, thin lisped tseee and a high trill in the same register, but from a tight flock in a fruiting tree or in flight overhead, not from the depths of a conifer.

Where the Golden-crowned Kinglet 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 Golden-crowned Kinglet appears in 29 state albums:

Questions people ask

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