Scientists will closely monitor the behavior of birds as the sun gradually "disappears" during the day (Photo: Yunus Malik/Shutterstock.com).
As millions of people across North America will gaze up at the sky to admire the total solar eclipse on April 8, some scientists are concerned about the behavioral changes in some animals, especially flying ones, affected by the natural phenomenon.
A team of researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been keeping a close eye on birds, bats, and insects in particular, after these creatures exhibited some rather strange behavior during the most recent total solar eclipse that occurred in North America.
"At dusk, insects, birds and bats will swoop to the ground to roost or prepare for their nocturnal activities," said Andrew Farnsworth, lead author of a study on flying animal behavior during the 2017 eclipse. "However, during the 2017 eclipse, we saw a decrease in the number of insect and bird flight movements and a very unusual pattern as the light faded and the sun suddenly disappeared."
The upcoming eclipse gives the team an opportunity to further study these unusual changes.
To do this, they plan to use weather radar stations in the path of the eclipse in the US to measure airborne activity. By removing signals from weather phenomena, they can measure the movements of flying animals - such as birds - over short periods of 3-4 minutes.
Then, at sunset, they will measure their activity again to compare the slightest changes in behavior during the total eclipse.
Only eight stations were installed along the path of the 2017 eclipse. The next eclipse will have 13 stations, and scientists hope they will have a fuller picture of how flying animals' behavior changes in response to changes in sunlight.
Birds' strange behavior during a solar eclipse may be related to their reaction to light (Photo: The Washington Post).
“It is very difficult to manipulate light at a large scale,” said Cecilia Nilsson, a behavioral ecologist who led the 2017 study, “and this unique natural phenomenon is helping us set up a giant ‘experiment’.”
During the last total solar eclipse in the US in 2017, animals at many zoos had many strange actions that surprised researchers, such as: turtles suddenly swayed, giraffes gathered and galloped, captive baboons suddenly groomed themselves vigorously, spiders removed their webs, some amphibians suddenly made strange sounds, bees flew back to their nests...
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