Great Blue Heron

Ardea herodias

common Least Concern

Live from the dock

Active 376 minutes across 91 days since May 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 3 sec

Unknown authorUnknown author via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

When you'll hear it

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 a.m. 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	4	10	11	9	11	58	89	36	19	12	13	9	7	9	3	5	4	4	5	5	17	17	11	8

Across the year

Present from late-April through October. First heard this year on May 3.

Dock records

First heard: May 3, 2026
Busiest day: 11 minutes on May 8, 2026
Earliest call: 12:19 a.m.
Days detected: 91 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Great Blue Heron at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard around sunrise, 5 to 8 a.m. Quiet in the afternoon. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Great Blue Heron most often.

What time of year is the Great Blue Heron at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-April through October. First heard this year on May 3. That window is when the Great Blue Heron has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Great Blue Heron been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 376 minutes across 91 days since May 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 great blue heron is a large wading bird in the heron family, common near shores of open water and wetlands over most of North and Central America, as well as Northwestern South America, the Caribbean, and the Galápagos Islands. It is occasionally found in the Azores and is a rare vagrant to Europe.

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