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Did the eclipse affect your animals?


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We were so far out of totality that odd animal behavior was no where on my radar. One cat, who is heart and soul my DH's (who is home today), spent the entire time climbing on and off my lap, following me around the house and acting super skittish. The other 4 kitties, while mostly acting like their normal selves, skipped their afternoon naps and spent that time staring out various windows. Considering how far away we were from events, it did get twilight kind of dark here so maybe it was messing with their internal clocks. I'd love to hear if your animals were up to anything unusual today.

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97% here, and no. All the cats acted normal and there were the usual birds at the feeder all afternoon. 
 

Gave me a massive headache and felt nauseous from the off putting light in the house though. 

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My cat didn't care until totality and then she was gazing at it for about a minute.  Probably just because she's never seen anything like it in the sky though.  It was fun having the three of us watching it together.  We heard an owl and also the spring peepers were peeping at totality and then stopped when it was over.

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We were 97%. The birds were noisy and active, stopped at peak, then a few minutes later started again. The dog and cats acted normal. The chickens were totally weirded out and kept all bunched up close to the chicken house door til the light was back to normal

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Our cat acted a bit confused but that may have been because we kept going out in the deck and then sat there for awhile. That is has not been normal behavior for us since last summer. So who knows. 

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I kept checking the bird cam of the feeder at Cornell (Ithaca, NY). I wondered how their behavior was today.  About  a 1/2 hour or so before eclipse, the birds vanished from the feeder. I checked here and there and only heard honking a little of geese in the reeds.  No birds were on the water until it seemed the eclipse passed, then the geese ventured out. Eventually a black type bird ventured back to the feeder. He kept looking up at the sky like he was wondering if the sky was going to fall, then decided to eat. Finally another bird joined him. That's my scientific observation of animal behavior today.😉

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We were pretty close to totality, but it was a totality of clouds. When we are outdoors, the cat will occasionally climb this one tree to let us know what a mighty kitty she is. During the eclipse, she climbed three different trees and was periodically skittish, which is not her normal self.

The birds were much more vocal just beforehand than they usually are at that time of day. They were completely quiet at the height of darkness,

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One dog was out with us at totality. She was more interested in the golden retriever down the street than in the eclipse, as far as I could tell. We’re away from home, though, and everything here is new to her, so she’s generally on high alert about her surroundings. If we’d been at home, and the eclipse was the only thing out of her ordinary life, who knows.

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We weren’t home to see our pets. However, we went to a little park on a large lake by us and witnessed - I am not sure what type of large birds they were, as I was too far away from them to even attempt an id - but they were dive bombing the water and feeding like mad. It was so wild to watch, as there were close to a dozen birds swooping down hard, splashing down hard in the water. It started about 10 minutes after totality and lasted several minutes. I go to this park quite often and have never witnessed anything like it. Birds reminded me of cormorants, but looked closer to all white/light gray, not black. 

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