Canada Goose

Branta canadensis

Live from the dock

Active 28 minutes across 8 days since May 2026. Last heard on July 11.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 3 sec

Unknown authorUnknown author via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

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	2	2	1	0	1	1	1	5	1	0	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	11	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-April through July. First heard this year on May 3.

Dock records

First heard: May 3, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 8 minutes on May 27, 2026
Earliest call: 12:56 a.m.
Days detected: 8 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Canada Goose at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet in the afternoon. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Canada Goose most often.

What time of year is the Canada Goose at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-April through July. First heard this year on May 3. That window is when the Canada Goose has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Canada Goose been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 28 minutes across 8 days since May 2026. Last heard on July 11.

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 Canada goose is a large species of goose with a black head and neck, white cheeks, white under its chin, and a brown body. It is native to the Arctic and temperate regions of North America, and it is occasionally found during migration across the Atlantic in northern Europe.

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