Wild Turkey

Meleagris gallopavo

Live from the dock

Active 23 minutes across 6 days since May 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 173 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 10 a.m.

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	1	0	2	5	4	0	0	0	2	2	2	1	0	0	2	1	1	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-May through July. First heard this year on May 27.

Dock records

First heard: May 27, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 13 minutes on May 29, 2026
Earliest call: 5:08 a.m.
Days detected: 6 of 69 days monitored

Common questions

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

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 10 a.m. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Wild Turkey most often.

What time of year is the Wild Turkey at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-May through July. First heard this year on May 27. That window is when the Wild Turkey has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Wild Turkey been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 23 minutes across 6 days since May 2026. Last heard today.

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 wild turkey is an upland game bird native to North America, one of two extant species of turkey and the heaviest member of the order Galliformes. It is the ancestor to the domestic turkey, which was originally derived from a southern Mexican subspecies of wild turkey.

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