Brown Creeper

Certhia americana

Live from the dock

Active 16 minutes across 7 days since September 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 19 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.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	0	0	0	0	0	2	3	2	3	2	1	2	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-September through November. First heard this year on September 23.

Dock records

First heard: September 23, 2026
Busiest day: 3 minutes on October 22, 2026
Earliest call: 8:13 a.m.
Days detected: 7 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Brown Creeper has only turned up on 7 of the 183 days we've been recording, so this is a short page. Every day it's on:

September 23, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 8:13 a.m.
October 22, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 10:00 a.m.
October 23, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 9:59 a.m.
October 28, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 8:18 a.m.
October 31, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 12:03 p.m.
November 3, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 11:32 a.m.
November 9, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 9:16 a.m.

If the mics catch it again, that day gets added to this list.

Heard alongside

Out of the 15 hours we've had the Brown Creeper on the mics, these birds turned up in the same hours the most. We pick them by how much their hours overlap.

Golden-crowned Kinglet: 13 of those 15 hours.
White-throated Sparrow: 12 of those 15 hours.
Eastern Towhee: 8 of those 15 hours.
Winter Wren: 8 of those 15 hours.
Mallard: 2 of those 15 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Brown Creeper at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Brown Creeper most often.

What time of year is the Brown Creeper at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-September through November. First heard this year on September 23. That window is when the Brown Creeper has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Brown Creeper been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 16 minutes across 7 days since September 2026. Last heard yesterday.

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.