Night Hawk Lake

Where Night Hawk Lake is

Night Hawk Lake lies in the District of Cochrane, within the City of Timmins.

How deep is Night Hawk Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Night Hawk Lake is 4.6 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 86 depth contours for Night Hawk Lake.

See also Ontario's Largest and Deepest Lakes

Surveyed Depths

Ontario has surveyed the depths of several thousand of its lakes over more than half a century. Later surveys were conducted by boat with satellite positioning and produced hundreds of thousands of soundings per lake. Earlier surveys were charted by running transects across the water and drawing depth contours by hand.

Water quality

Ontario’s Lake Partner Program is a volunteer monitoring network. Participants collect water samples for phosphorus analysis and measure water clarity through the summer with a Secchi disk. Most sites are sampled for phosphorus once a year, in spring, and some several times a year between spring and fall. Phosphorus in many lakes rises through the summer, so the two kinds of average are measured on different bases.

Phosphorus is the nutrient that controls how much algae a lake can grow. A lake with little phosphorus stays clear and supports cold-water fish such as lake trout. As phosphorus rises, algae increase, the water clouds, and oxygen in the deep water falls as the algae decay. The province classifies each monitoring site by its average phosphorus:

• Oligotrophic, below 10 micrograms per litre: clear water and low algae.
• Mesotrophic, from 10 to 20: moderately productive water, with more algae and weed growth than an oligotrophic lake but rarely a bloom.
• Eutrophic, above 20: nutrient-rich water, prone to algal blooms and low oxygen at depth.

Night Hawk Lake has 4 Lake Partner monitoring sites, none of which has yet reported phosphorus for the three years the province requires before a status is assigned.

A Secchi disk is a white or black-and-white plate lowered on a marked line until it disappears from view. The depth at which it vanishes is the Secchi depth, a direct measure of water clarity. Clearer water gives a deeper reading.

See also Lake Water Quality and Blue-Green Algae in Ontario

Night Hawk Lake Weather

The weather page for Night Hawk Lake carries the forecast over the water, wave heights across the lake, and the modelled water temperature.

Night Hawk Lake weather

Water temperature

No provincial monitoring station records water temperature on Night Hawk Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Timmins A climate station, 34 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 10,868 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Night Hawk Lake; the model uses 1.3 meters, estimated from the lake’s depth contours.

Each day’s figure carries the model’s typical error for that month on lakes of the same size. The figure in the chart below is the temperature near the surface, away from the shoreline. Bays, shallows and water deeper below the surface differ in temperature. Temperature is not measured when ice covers the lake. The weather page for Night Hawk Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Night Hawk Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records list no species for Night Hawk Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name seven species, among them cisco, northern pike and sauger. They appear in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Northern Pikepike
• Walleyeperch
• Saugerperch

Eating the fish

The 2026 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for seven species taken from Night Hawk Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Cody Twp., Cochrane Dist. Each figure below is the most meals a month the guide advises for a fish of that length. Where mercury sets the advice, the figure falls as the fish gets longer, because mercury accumulates over a fish’s life. Where the guide has no result yet for certain contaminants at a location, it sets a precautionary limit of 16 meals a month. A zero means the guide advises no meals of that fish at that size.

General population: adultsSensitive population: children under fifteen, women who are or may become pregnant

Fisheries Management Zone 8

Night Hawk Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 8. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Night Hawk Lake

See also Fishing Seasons in Ontario, Zone by Zone and Fish Stocking in Ontario Lakes

Islands and names

Night Hawk Lake contains 46 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, one of them over 10 hectares and fifteen under a tenth of a hectare. Three of them lie mostly inside wetland the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset maps as open water or fen. Moose Island, at 34 hectares, is larger than the next ten together, which cover 31.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 31 official names on the water and its islands: 19 islands, three bays, one rock, one point on an island and four rivers. A further 2 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 3

• Carman Bay
• Northeast Bay
• St. Peter Bay

Shoals and rocks 1

• Gull Rock

Points on the shore 2

• Cemetery Point
• Poplar Point

Nearby lakes

• Porcupine Lake17 km away
• Frederick House Lake23 km away
• Watabeag Lake39 km away
• Mistinikon Lake56 km away

All lakes

Questions about Night Hawk Lake

• How deep is Night Hawk Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 4.6 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Night Hawk Lake?

  Its surface covers 108.8 square kilometers and it holds 46 islands. Of its 164 kilometers of shoreline, 147 kilometers is the mainland shore and 17 kilometers is the shore of the islands.