Interesting trends & observations

Wow! With over 2700 observations, it's taking us awhile to go through everything! But we wanted to update everyone with some interesting things we've seen so far.

Overall, the species observed were pretty diverse - you can see them listed from most commonly observed to least frequently observed here. You can see that many people chose to observe species that they had at their house - pets, birds that came to feeders, chickens, etc., but also things like ants, spiders, and bees that they could find nearby. Some people chose to go to the zoo during the eclipse, so we also ended up with observations of animals like lions, giraffes, and elephants!

In terms of classifying the behavior observed in these species, we've primarily gone through bird, reptile, amphibian, and some insect observations so far:
• Quite a few people observed swallows or swifts starting to flock and fly during the eclipse.
• A good number of participants had chickens that they could observe during the eclipse - many of them noticed their hens gathering together or roosting and getting quiet during the eclipse, while many people also noted that their roosters started crowing during the eclipse.
• Many people who participated had very active bird feeders in their yard and noted, especially for hummingbirds, that the birds stopped feeding for the entirety of totality/maximum coverage.
• A handful of people heard frogs start to call during the eclipse.
• And quite a lot of people reported cicadas and crickets - hearing their calls start or stop during the eclipse (many heard cicadas stop singing and crickets start, which then reversed once totality/maximum coverage was over!).

We want to stress that these are just interesting trends we've noted so far - they're not results since we haven't gone through all the observations yet and haven't done any analysis.

Some interesting/fun observations of wild organisms:
• Black bear
• Coyote
• Humpback whales
• Alligator
• Two beautiful photos of butterflies with the crescent shadows caused by the eclipse: observation 1, observation 2
• Butterfly that landed on someone with their eclipse glasses on
• Birds flying during totality

And if you're interested in looking at more observations, you can see all those uploaded to the project here.

Keep checking back here! We'll update with more finds as we continue to go through all the observations.

Posted on September 12, 2017 04:17 PM by kestrel