Hermit Thrush

Catharus guttatus

Live from the dock

Active 8 minutes across 4 days since October 2026. Last heard 3 days ago.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 10 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 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	1	1	2	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from mid-October through November. First heard this year on October 12.

Dock records

First heard: October 12, 2026
Busiest day: 2 minutes on October 12, 2026
Earliest call: 5:00 a.m.
Days detected: 4 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

We've only got the Hermit Thrush on 4 of the 183 days we've been listening, so there isn't enough yet to say much about seasons or trends. Here's every day it turned up:

October 12, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 5:00 a.m.
October 22, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 7:07 a.m.
November 1, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 12:11 p.m.
November 7, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 7:44 a.m.

If the mics catch it again, that day gets added to this list.

Heard alongside

Birds that keep turning up in the same hours as the Hermit Thrush. We pick them by overlap, so a bird that's around all day doesn't make the list just by being everywhere.

White-throated Sparrow: 5 of those 8 hours.
Golden-crowned Kinglet: 5 of those 8 hours.
Northern Flicker: 5 of those 8 hours.
Eastern Towhee: 4 of those 8 hours.
Yellow-rumped Warbler: 4 of those 8 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Hermit Thrush at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 a.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Hermit Thrush most often.

What time of year is the Hermit Thrush at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from mid-October through November. First heard this year on October 12. That window is when the Hermit Thrush has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Hermit Thrush been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 8 minutes across 4 days since October 2026. Last heard 3 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.