Killdeer

Charadrius vociferus

Live from the dock

Active 62 minutes across 12 days since August 2026. Last heard 5 days ago.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 3 sec

Unknown authorUnknown author via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

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	12	6	10	14	1	0	0	2	1	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	5	5	1	2	2

Across the year

Present from late-August through November. First heard this year on August 24.

Dock records

First heard: August 24, 2026
Busiest day: 20 minutes on October 4, 2026
Earliest call: 12:00 a.m.
Days detected: 12 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

We don't hear the Killdeer very often, 12 of 183 days so far. It's #63 of 107 species by minutes active (62).

The busiest month was October, with 50 minutes active. We didn't hear it once in May, June and July. Best single day so far was October 4, 2026, 20 minutes active. The recordings only go back to May 2, 2026, so we've got nothing for December through April yet.

Killdeer by month at the dock
Month	Days heard	Minutes active
May 2026	0 of 20	0
June 2026	0 of 30	0
July 2026	0 of 31	0
August 2026	1 of 31	2
September 2026	3 of 30	8
October 2026	7 of 31	50
November 2026	1 of 10	2

It's pretty active after dark, 77% of its minutes come between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., peaking around 3 a.m.

No big change recently, 3 of the last 30 days.

Heard alongside

Out of the 30 hours we've had the Killdeer on the mics, these birds turned up in the same hours the most. We pick them by how much their hours overlap.

Canada Goose: 4 of those 30 hours.
Barred Owl: 3 of those 30 hours.
Summer Tanager: 3 of those 30 hours.
Pileated Woodpecker: 2 of those 30 hours.
Red-tailed Hawk: 2 of those 30 hours.

Common questions

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

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet around midday. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Killdeer most often.

What time of year is the Killdeer at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-August through November. First heard this year on August 24. That window is when the Killdeer has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Killdeer been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 62 minutes across 12 days since August 2026. Last heard 5 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 killdeer is a large plover found in the Americas. Its shrill, two-syllable call is often heard, sounding like "kill deer". It was described and given its current scientific name in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae.

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