Mallard

Anas platyrhynchos

Live from the dock

Active 31 minutes across 12 days since September 2026. Last heard 2 days ago.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 4 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 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	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	3	0	1	3	3	3	6	1	5	2	0	2	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-August through November. First heard this year on September 5.

Dock records

First heard: September 5, 2026
Busiest day: 4 minutes on October 31, 2026
Earliest call: 12:45 a.m.
Days detected: 12 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Mallard doesn't come through much. 12 of the 183 days we've been listening, 31 minutes active total, #74 of the 107 species we've caught.

It peaked in October at 22 minutes active. We didn't hear it once in May, June, July and August. The record day is October 31, 2026 with 4 minutes active. Keep in mind the mics only went live on May 2, 2026, so we don't have December through April yet.

Mallard 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	0 of 31	0
September 2026	3 of 30	7
October 2026	8 of 31	22
November 2026	1 of 10	2

It doesn't lean early or late. Its top hour is 1 p.m., 19% of the total.

Lately it's about the same as it's been, 8 of the last 30 days.

Heard alongside

These are the birds we hear most in the same hours as the Mallard. An hour counts as shared when the mics pick up both in it, and we pick the list by how much their hours overlap.

Common Grackle: calling in 18 of those 27 hours.
Yellow-rumped Warbler: calling in 10 of those 27 hours.
Common Starling: calling in 9 of those 27 hours.
Gadwall: calling in 7 of those 27 hours.
Brown Creeper: calling in 2 of those 27 hours.

Common questions

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

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Mallard most often.

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

Present from late-August through November. First heard this year on September 5. That window is when the Mallard has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Mallard been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 31 minutes across 12 days since September 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 mallard or wild duck is a dabbling duck that breeds throughout the temperate and subtropical Americas, Eurasia, and North Africa. It has been introduced to New Zealand, Australia, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the Falkland Islands, and South Africa.

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