The Eclipse in Nature

by Steve Dunford

I was curious yesterday how the eclipse would affect wildlife, animals and the temperature change in general.

At my vantage point in West Frankfort, I noticed around 12:50 p.m. the cicadas and crickets began to holler and chirp.  The birds were going to their nests.  A few minutes the wind began to pick up, then there was a stillness like nightfall.

I wrote a piece yesterday discussing some things that I thought would be really cool to experience during the event.  One of those was to be on a local lake.  At one time, I used to   I have read several accounts on social media that stated that fish began to feed and flop like they do in the evening before dark.  They began to jump close to and during totality, after the eclipse, the fish calmed down.

In the building that I live in, there are some people that have service dogs.  There is one that I pay close attention to is a black and white Shih Tzu.  At one time I had a dog like that.  I know they are very smart and sense things.

Around 1:00 p.m., I noticed that it was running in circles.  The other dogs seemed slightly agitated and a little nervous.  Close to totality they became very calm.

Jagger’s Doggie Day Care in Mt. Vernon is a sponsor of this page.  They committed to keep the dogs indoors during the eclipse.  I talked with Connie Olson, owner and operator with her husband Randy this afternoon.  She said on a normal day there are a lot of dogs that sleep in the afternoon because they play hard in the morning.  Yesterday, because they were thinking it was nightfall, 95% were asleep.

I mentioned that I would love to been on a farm, to see how the livestock acted.  Even though I grew up on Main Street in Thompsonville, our neighbor across the road that lived there until I was about 14, Gene Lager,  had cattle.

When there was a bad storm or other changes in nature, I always would remember they would act strange.  I would have liked to compare notes from my childhood or the times I have helped farmers out from time to time as a teenager in what I noticed.

The roosters did crow.  At first I said I was more interested in the things of nature.  However,  “God’s Light Show” was the greatest thing I ever experienced.