Chipping Sparrow

Spizella passerina

Live from the dock

Active 771 minutes across 14 days since May 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 3 sec

Francis C, Ortega C, Cruz A via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5

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	50	74	56	72	39	68	63	78	46	66	15	48	69	13	14	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-May through July. First heard this year on May 8.

Dock records

First heard: May 8, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 118 minutes on July 16, 2026
Earliest call: 6:08 a.m.
Days detected: 14 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Chipping Sparrow 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 Chipping Sparrow most often.

What time of year is the Chipping Sparrow at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-May through July. First heard this year on May 8. That window is when the Chipping Sparrow has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Chipping Sparrow been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 771 minutes across 14 days since May 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 chipping sparrow is a species of New World sparrow, a passerine bird in the family Passerellidae. It is widespread, fairly tame, and common across most of its North American range.

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