How will animals react to Quebec's total solar eclipse?
It’s possible animals — pets and wildlife alike — will behave unusually during Quebec’s total solar eclipse on April 8 , according to experts on their behaviour.
David Bird, emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, told the Montreal Gazette that birds, insects and bats are the main groups expected to be affected, or “the main ones that everybody’s sort of keeping an eye on.”
Bird studied the effects of changing light cycles on birds for decades and said they, like a lot of wildlife, are “greatly affected by light-dark cycles.”
“In fact, it’s light-dark cycles that basically determine that birds are going to breed in the springtime and then migrate in the fall,” he said, explaining they have receptors in their eyes and skin that detect changes in light.
“Just to give you an example of how powerful this is, a student of mine and I, many years ago, actually fooled some pairs of American kestrels into thinking that it was springtime right in the middle of winter in Montreal,” Bird said. “We got them breeding, we got them laying eggs and even hatching eggs out in the middle of winter in our facility because we fooled them by using artificial light and timing clocks.”
He predicts birds will be affected by the eclipse, but “quite momentarily” given the fact that totality — the time when near-complete darkness hits — will last for fewer than four minutes.
“If I’m a bird … and I’m feeding at a feeder in the backyard and suddenly it goes dark for 3½ to four minutes, what I would probably do is say: ‘Oh my god, night’s coming on,’ and if you’re a daytime bird, you’re going to definitely go where there’s some cover so that you don’t get nailed by a predator,” Bird said.
He explained a lot of birds make noise just before going to sleep at night and when they wake up in the morning, so during the eclipse, “there’s going to be a momentary thing like that.”
“But it’s not going to last very long,” Bird said.
Bird suspects nocturnal animals won’t be affected by the eclipse because totality won’t last long enough for them to think it’s nighttime.
“Based on anecdotal observations from the 2017 eclipse, bears in zoos, for example, just simply opened their eyes up a little bit and yawned and kept on sleeping,” he said. “Even owls, for example — it’s possible that if they’re not in a deep sleep, they’re going to look and say: ‘Oh my god, it’s getting dark, it’s time to go hunting.’ But they don’t suddenly, like a light switch … fly off somewhere to go look for mice or whatever. They usually sit there for a while … and then the next thing you know it’s getting light again, so they’ll just go back to sleep.”