Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Sphyrapicus varius

Live from the dock

Active 51 minutes across 11 days since October 2026. Last heard today.

Heard today

Hear the call

Reference recording · 17 sec

G. McGrane via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

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	0	0	0	0	0	0	6	8	4	4	2	2	6	7	6	1	3	2	0	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-October through November. First heard this year on October 6.

Dock records

First heard: October 6, 2026
Busiest day: 10 minutes on October 23, 2026
Earliest call: 6:50 a.m.
Days detected: 11 of 183 days monitored

What our dock mics have heard

We don't hear the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker very often, 11 of 183 days so far. It's #67 of 107 species by minutes active (51).

November has been its big month so far, 29 minutes active. May, June, July, August and September came up empty. Its biggest day was October 23, 2026, 10 minutes active. We started listening on May 2, 2026, so there's nothing for December through April yet.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker 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	0 of 30	0
October 2026	6 of 31	22
November 2026	5 of 10	29

It doesn't lean early or late. Its top hour is 7 a.m., 16% of the total. Earliest we've caught one is 6:50 a.m.

Lately it's really picked up, 10 of the past 30 days against 1% of days earlier on.

Heard alongside

These are the birds we hear most in the same hours as the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. 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 27 of the 29 hours.
Golden-crowned Kinglet: in 25 of the 29 hours.
Winter Wren: in 15 of the 29 hours.
Song Sparrow: in 12 of the 29 hours.
Rusty Blackbird: in 4 of the 29 hours.

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker 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 Yellow-bellied Sapsucker most often.

What time of year is the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-October through November. First heard this year on October 6. That window is when the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 51 minutes across 11 days since October 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.