Chuck-will's-widow

Antrostomus carolinensis

Live from the dock

Active 117 minutes across 4 days since May 2026. Last heard on June 3.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 10 sec

Jordgette via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet around midday.

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	6	19	12	34	32	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	12	1	0

Across the year

Present from late-May through June. First heard this year on May 30.

Dock records

First heard: May 30, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 56 minutes on June 3, 2026
Earliest call: 12:18 a.m.
Days detected: 4 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Chuck-will's-widow at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet around midday. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Chuck-will's-widow most often.

What time of year is the Chuck-will's-widow at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-May through June. First heard this year on May 30. That window is when the Chuck-will's-widow has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Chuck-will's-widow been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 117 minutes across 4 days since May 2026. Last heard on June 3.

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 chuck-will's-widow is a nocturnal bird of the nightjar family Caprimulgidae. It is mostly found in the southeastern United States near swamps, rocky uplands, and pine woods. It migrates to the West Indies, Central America, and northwestern South America.

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