Red-headed Woodpecker

Melanerpes erythrocephalus

Live from the dock

Active 7,157 minutes across 135 days since May 2026. Last heard yesterday.

In our records

Hear the call

Reference recording · 32 sec

Jonathon Jongsma via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

When you'll hear it

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 11 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	116	754	931	898	776	601	433	358	245	250	332	502	578	308	74	1	0	0

Across the year

Present from late-May through October. First heard this year on May 31.

Dock records

First heard: May 31, 2026
Busiest day: 125 minutes on October 19, 2026
Earliest call: 6:10 a.m.
Days detected: 135 of 162 days monitored

Common questions

What time of day do you hear a Red-headed Woodpecker at Watts Bar Lake?

Most often heard in the morning, 8 to 11 a.m. Quiet overnight. These are the hours the dock microphones detect the Red-headed Woodpecker most often.

What time of year is the Red-headed Woodpecker at Watts Bar Lake?

Present from late-May through October. First heard this year on May 31. That window is when the Red-headed Woodpecker has been audible from the Watts Bar Lake dock.

Has the Red-headed Woodpecker been heard at Watts Bar Lake?

Yes. Active 7,157 minutes across 135 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 red-headed woodpecker is a mid-sized woodpecker found in temperate North America. Its breeding habitat is open country across southern Canada and the east-central United States. It is rated as least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature 's Red List of Endangered species, having been down-listed from near threatened in 2018.

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