Swamp Sparrow

Melospiza georgiana

Live from the dock

Active 14 minutes across 2 days since October 2026. Last heard on October 21.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 68 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 1 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	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	10	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from mid-October through October. First heard this year on October 19.

Dock records

First heard: October 19, 2026
Busiest day: 12 minutes on October 19, 2026
Earliest call: 10:36 a.m.
Days detected: 2 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

The Swamp Sparrow 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 19, 2026: 12 minutes active, first call at 10:43 a.m.
October 21, 2026: 2 minutes active, first call at 10:36 a.m.

Next time we hear one it'll get added here.

Heard alongside

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

White-throated Sparrow: in 5 of the 5 hours.
Yellow-rumped Warbler: in 4 of the 5 hours.
Canada Goose: in 3 of the 5 hours.
Ruby-crowned Kinglet: in 2 of the 5 hours.
Winter Wren: in 2 of the 5 hours.

Common questions

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

Most often heard around midday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Swamp Sparrow most often.

What time of year is the Swamp Sparrow at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from mid-October through October. First heard this year on October 19. That window is when the Swamp Sparrow has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Swamp Sparrow been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 14 minutes across 2 days since October 2026. Last heard on October 21.

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.