Black-crowned Night Heron

Nycticorax nycticorax

Live from the dock

Active 44 minutes across 12 days since June 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 7 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet in the afternoon.

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	7	3	0	3	2	2	0	1	0	1	0	1	2	3	2	4	13	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-June through July. First heard this year on June 14.

Dock records

First heard: June 14, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 7 minutes on June 16, 2026
Earliest call: 5:21 a.m.
Days detected: 12 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Black-crowned Night Heron at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet in the afternoon. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Black-crowned Night Heron most often.

What time of year is the Black-crowned Night Heron at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-June through July. First heard this year on June 14. That window is when the Black-crowned Night Heron has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Black-crowned Night Heron been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 44 minutes across 12 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 black-crowned night heron or black-capped night heron, commonly shortened to just night heron in Eurasia, is a medium-sized heron found throughout a large part of the world, including parts of Europe, Asia, and North and South America.

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