Osprey

Pandion haliaetus

common Least Concern

Live from the dock

Active 3,451 minutes across 95 days since May 2026. Last heard on September 11.

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 in the evening, 5 to 9 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	8	341	288	258	272	224	135	128	168	192	255	268	266	222	167	200	59	0	0

Across the year

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

Dock records

First heard: May 27, 2026
Busiest day: 119 minutes on August 11, 2026
Earliest call: 5:35 a.m.
Days detected: 95 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

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

Most often heard in the evening, 5 to 9 p.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Osprey most often.

What time of year is the Osprey at Watts Bar Lake?

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

Has the Osprey been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 3,451 minutes across 95 days since May 2026. Last heard on September 11.

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 osprey, historically known as sea hawk, river hawk, and fish hawk, is a diurnal, fish-eating bird of prey with a cosmopolitan range. It is a large raptor, reaching more than 60 cm in length and a wingspan of 180 cm. It is brown on the upperparts and predominantly greyish on the head and underparts.

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