Northern Bobwhite

Colinus virginianus

Live from the dock

Active 4 minutes across 2 days since July 2026. Last heard on August 4.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 42 sec

G. McGrane via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

When you'll hear it

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 10 a.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	1	0	1	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Across the year

Present from early-July through August. First heard this year on July 9.

Dock records

First heard: July 9, 2026 (first in our records)
Busiest day: 2 minutes on July 9, 2026
Earliest call: 6:54 a.m.
Days detected: 2 of 95 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Northern Bobwhite at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 10 a.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Northern Bobwhite most often.

What time of year is the Northern Bobwhite at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from early-July through August. First heard this year on July 9. That window is when the Northern Bobwhite has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Northern Bobwhite been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 4 minutes across 2 days since July 2026. Last heard on August 4.

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 northern bobwhite, also known as the Virginia quail or bobwhite quail, is a ground-dwelling bird native to Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, with introduced populations elsewhere in the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. It is a member of the group of species known as New World quail.

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