Great Horned Owl

Bubo virginianus

Live from the dock

Active 18 minutes across 2 days since August 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 16 sec

Michael & Katie LaTour via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 7 a.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	13	4	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from mid-August through August. First heard this year on August 19.

Dock records

First heard: August 19, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 15 minutes on August 19, 2026
Earliest call: 5:48 a.m.
Days detected: 2 of 109 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Great Horned Owl at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 7 a.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Great Horned Owl most often.

What time of year is the Great Horned Owl at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from mid-August through August. First heard this year on August 19. That window is when the Great Horned Owl has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Great Horned Owl been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 18 minutes across 2 days since August 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 great horned owl, also known as the tiger owl or the hoot owl, is a large owl native to the Americas. It is an extremely adaptable bird with a vast range and is the most widely distributed true owl in the Americas.

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