Solar eclipses are pretty cool, and it is pretty easy to see that they have a massive effect on how humans behave. When the 2024 Great American Eclipse passed by, millions of people traveled to the path of totality to see it for themselves.

For generations, people have said that this type of eclipse also has a dramatic impact on animal behavior, but it has been historically hard to confirm. Total solar eclipses are pretty rare, and they don’t last that long, so it is hard to get enough data to ensure a proper understanding of how animals actually behave.

A team of researchers wanted to change that, so in the time leading up to this eclipse, they created a phone app called SolarBird. The app was intended to allow regular people to help gather data from across the path of totality (and even outside of it) so that the scientists could look deeply into the avian behavior.

The effort was a huge success, with submissions coming from 1700 users, providing a total of nearly 11,000 observations. These took place from across the path of totality as well as areas outside it, so the researchers had a lot of information to work with.

Indiana University PhD student, Liz Aguilar said in a statement about the event:

“Scientists can’t be in a thousand places at once. The app gets around this problem by leveraging the public as scientists. It also encourages people to look around and listen, adding to the show in the sky.”

The users of the app were instructed to find a particular bird that they could observe during the time before, during, and after the eclipse. They would then answer 10 simple questions about what they observed.

Since the event, the scientists have been analyzing the data, and they have finally published their findings. The study is available in Science.

Interestingly, birds didn’t all react in the same ways. 23 species that were analyzed seemed to have no change in their normal behavior at all. 29, on the other hand, displayed significant changes in the songs that they were producing.

Even within those 29 species that had a significant change, it wasn’t all in the same way. Ten of the species were more vocal than normal as the sun was going dark, and one sang significantly less. 19 of them sang their morning songs during the time when the sun was reemerging from behind the moon.

During the approximately 4 minutes of the total eclipse, only 12 species behaved unusually.

Total eclipses are rare enough that the vast majority of birds will only experience one (or zero) in their lifetimes, so they can’t have gotten used to the event. These birds would have, however, experienced plenty of times when the sun seems to darken.

Of course, every night and morning the sun goes through these phases, but even in the middle of the day it can happen when there are particularly dark clouds. Understanding how the changes in light impacts bird behavior is important not just for the rare eclipses, but for bird behavior in general. In the study, the authors wrote:

“It’s crazy that you can turn off the Sun, even briefly, and birds’ physiology is so tuned to those changes that they act like it’s morning. This has important implications on the impact of urbanization or artificial light at night, which are much more widespread.”

The authors hope to use the same app during future eclipses to get even more data. Different species live in different parts of the world, so over time, they will be able to understand the behavior changes of more species of birds.

This can help them to understand how birds may be impacted not just by eclipses, but also the growing light pollution created by humans.

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