Merlin

Falco columbarius

Live from the dock

Active 4 minutes across 2 days since October 2026. Last heard on October 22.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 33 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

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	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	1	0	0

Across the year

Present from mid-October through October. First heard this year on October 16.

Dock records

First heard: October 16, 2026
Busiest day: 2 minutes on October 16, 2026
Earliest call: 2:26 a.m.
Days detected: 2 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Merlin has only turned up on 2 of the 183 days we've been recording, so this is a short page. Every day it's on:

October 16, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 7:51 p.m.
October 22, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 2:26 a.m.

If it comes through again it'll show up here on the next update.

Heard alongside

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

Great Blue Heron: 2 of those 4 hours.

Common questions

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

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

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

Present from mid-October through October. First heard this year on October 16. That window is when the Merlin has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Merlin been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 4 minutes across 2 days since October 2026. Last heard on October 22.

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 merlin is a small species of falcon from the Northern Hemisphere, with numerous subspecies throughout North America and Eurasia. A bird of prey, the merlin breeds in the northern Holarctic; some migrate to subtropical and northern tropical regions in winter. Males typically have wingspans of 53–58 centimetres, with females being slightly larger.

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