Least Sandpiper

Calidris minutilla

Live from the dock

Active 9 minutes across 3 days since September 2026. Last heard on October 14.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 9 sec

Jeff Stewart via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard in the afternoon, 3 to 5 p.m. Quiet around dawn.

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	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	1	0	0	0	2	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-August through October. First heard this year on September 4.

Dock records

First heard: September 4, 2026
Busiest day: 3 minutes on September 4, 2026
Earliest call: 1:36 a.m.
Days detected: 3 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

Not a lot of data on this one, 3 of 183 days. Here's the full list:

September 4, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 10:50 a.m.
September 23, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 3:38 p.m.
October 14, 2026: 3 minutes active, first call at 1:36 a.m.

We haven't heard one since October 14, 2026, 27 days ago. Next time we hear one it'll get added here.

Heard alongside

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

House Finch: in 6 of the 8 hours.
Eastern Wood-Pewee: in 4 of the 8 hours.
Belted Kingfisher: in 3 of the 8 hours.
Blue-grey Gnatcatcher: in 2 of the 8 hours.
Common Grackle: in 2 of the 8 hours.

Common questions

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

Most often heard in the afternoon, 3 to 5 p.m. Quiet around dawn. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Least Sandpiper most often.

What time of year is the Least Sandpiper at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-August through October. First heard this year on September 4. That window is when the Least Sandpiper has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Least Sandpiper been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 9 minutes across 3 days since September 2026. Last heard on October 14.

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 least sandpiper is the smallest shorebird. The genus name is from Ancient Greek kalidris or skalidris, a term used by Aristotle for some grey-coloured waterside birds. The specific minutilla is Medieval Latin for "very small".

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