On average, a total solar eclipse occurs in the same place only once every 375 years. Most wild animals, like most people, have never seen the sky quickly switch to night in the middle of the day. These rare events are a natural experiment that can help scientists like us understand how animals respond to an unusual sudden change in light.
Remarkably, the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, coincided with an exciting time for wild birds. Local birds were singing for mates and fighting for territories as they geared up for their once-a-year chance to breed.
Because birds use light to match their behaviors to their environment, we had lots of questions about how they would respond to the eclipse. Would they pause their fighting and wooing and shift toward bedtime-like behaviors? How about a nocturnal animal like an owl – would they start to rustle from their roosts before they realize it’s not night? See what it looked like, here at 60x speed.
To help answer these questions, we joined forces with the public to engage community scientists actively in data collection, while staying true to the very best of animal behavior science. We leveraged campus-wide collaborations to create a free smartphone app, ‘SolarBird’, to collect bird behavior observations before, during, and after totality.
More than 1,500 participants from Mexico to Canada submitted nearly 11,000 observations! SolarBird users reported significantly higher rates of vocalizations during totality than in periods before or after. Non-vocal behaviors, like flying or remaining stationary, were documented at significantly lower rates during totality.
Read our paper here: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adx3025
Listen to a Science podcast about this project, the joys of team science, and more: https://www.science.org/
Other press coverage: Scientific American, Yahoo! News, ABC.ES.
Let’s learn to observe, wonder about, and measure behavior like a real-life behavioral biologist!
