Common Nighthawk

Chordeiles minor

Live from the dock

Active 17 minutes across 5 days since July 2026. Last heard 2 days ago.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 5 sec

Unknown authorUnknown author via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

When you'll hear it

Most often heard in the evening, 5 to 9 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	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	2	0	3	1	2	5	1	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-July through July. First heard this year on July 6.

Dock records

First heard: July 6, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 5 minutes on July 8, 2026
Earliest call: 6:30 a.m.
Days detected: 5 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Common Nighthawk at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard in the evening, 5 to 9 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Common Nighthawk most often.

What time of year is the Common Nighthawk at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-July through July. First heard this year on July 6. That window is when the Common Nighthawk has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Common Nighthawk been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 17 minutes across 5 days since July 2026. Last heard 2 days ago.

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 common nighthawk or bullbat is a medium-sized crepuscular or nocturnal bird of the Americas within the nightjar family, whose presence and identity are best revealed by its vocalization. This bird is most conspicuous when in its buoyant and erratic flight.

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