Barred Owl

Strix varia

Live from the dock

Active 120 minutes across 26 days since June 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 6 sec

Rob Porter via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet in the afternoon.

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	5	8	7	2	5	7	1	4	1	6	1	0	3	1	4	0	1	2	3	8	20	17	10	4

Across the year

Present from early-June through October. First heard this year on June 4.

Dock records

First heard: June 4, 2026
Busiest day: 21 minutes on October 12, 2026
Earliest call: 12:02 a.m.
Days detected: 26 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

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

Most often heard overnight, after dark. Quiet in the afternoon. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Barred Owl most often.

What time of year is the Barred Owl at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-June through October. First heard this year on June 4. That window is when the Barred Owl has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Barred Owl been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 120 minutes across 26 days since June 2026. Last heard yesterday.

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 barred owl, also known as the northern barred owl, striped owl or, more informally, hoot owl or eight-hooter owl, is a North American large species of owl. A member of the true owl family, Strigidae, they belong to the genus Strix, which is also the origin of the family's name under Linnaean taxonomy.

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