What do birds do during a solar eclipse?
April 2024 by Beary Birding
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On 8 April 2024, the moon passed directly in front of the sun, visible across a band through North America from Texas to Newfoundland and all the cities in between. Go back in time and visualize the path of the eclipse here!
Most songbirds sing their dusk songs during a solar eclipse, according to prior studies and observations (Nilsson et al., 2018). During complete darkness of "totality", many diurnal birds fall silent and nocturnal or crepuscular birds and animals come out.
Although I was barely out of the path of totality at about 89% coverage, I sought to put these rumours to the test. When the day finally arrived, I recorded the birds and their vocalizations during the event. Below you will find my observations of the eclipse and the species I noted reacting to it:
Partial Solar Eclipse watching with 88.82% of the sun obscured by the moon. Eclipse began at 2:00, maximum at 3:20, and ended at 4:30. We arrived at around 2:51 when the sun was almost covered. We hurried past the crowd of eager observers and made it to the researched hill by the powerlines at which point I made a realization that the powerlines might make it into my photographs. Nevertheless, I stayed on the hill, adjusted my camera, and aligned it with the sun with a growing bite taken out of it.
As I was busy trying to set up my camera and solar filter, I noticed the rumoured bird behaviours: passerines began singing more frequently, just as they due closer to dusk. They began flocking in dusk flocks. AMROs flew out from the field and into the trees of the other side of the park and called and sang as they do each night while their earthworm prey descended into the earth.
Although the sky was clear for much of the morning and it certainly wasn’t pouring like it had been the past week, the clouds decided to move in and worsen just as the maximum eclipse occurred. However, the immaculate shot of a flock of CANGs flying over the crescent sun would only be a dream as I witnessed the imprint of clouds surrounding the bitten sun.
Just before the ominous cloud rolled through alongside the maximum eclipse, I heard the distinct yet exotic call of a rooster, something that I never would have expected here. Although purely incidental, this observation was certainly irregular.
Given the misfortune that dark clouds happened to obscure the sun while the moon helplessly continued its waltz above it, the meteorological observations I made could have been influenced by either obstacle blocking the sun’s solar output. The air certainly cooled and the sky grew grim as at least two WTSPs made their dusk vocalizations. However, no NOCAs did the same and none of the typically crepuscular mammals at this location (White-tailed Deer, Eastern Cottontail) came out.
White-throated Sparrow
And soon came the rumoured excellence of maximum eclipse: 8 April 2024 at 3:23 PM, a time that I had been looking forward to for several months and a moment that some wait decades to observe. I watched the superior (near) conjunction of these two celestial bodies in awe through even a three-inch LCD screen behind dark clouds.
Then, all too soon, the moon evacuated its location. As it exited through the top, I noticed a large spot on the sun that I later found out was a sunspot!
Right as daylight began increasing again, species increased in song. Most noticeably, insects began gravitating toward me during this time as I noticed several fly-like insects on me and none prior.
After watching the moon rise all the way up, leaving the sun without a trace as it was a few hours prior, we headed back down the hill where the AMROs went back to normal picking worms out from the ground and the EABLs bickered with HOSPs for nestboxes.
CHSPs appeared from out of nowhere and DEJUs gathered in a big flock, although they could have been around in the beginning and I was merely in a rush to glimpse the eclipse on the way in.
All in all, the solar eclipse was truly a sight to behold. While my observations might be purely anecdotal, the remarkable sight (albeit, a cloudy one) of the eclipse will live on with me. I have a suspicion that many bird species may react to a solar eclipse in the same way they react to an ominous thunderstorm, although the latter is ironically under-researched despite its frequency. However, in the true path of totality, birds would certainly react differently to a seemingly 3-minute long night while thunderstorms that severe are rare. There’s a lot to research on solar eclipses and their effects on wildlife and on us, so I hope this one checklist could have a chance at getting us one step closer to discovering the secrets of what they do differently (if they do behave differently).
Interesting articles about solar eclipses and birds
Sources
Nilsson, C., Horton, K. G., Dokter, A. M., Van Doren, B. M., & Farnsworth, A. (2018). Aeroecology of a solar eclipse. Biology letters, 14(11), 20180485. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2018.0485
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