I got to see "totality". But we weren't fishing. My family slept out under the stars on open rangeland in NE with a whole lotta Hereford's, yipping coyotes, and quite a few shooting stars. It was wonderful.
Eclipse lighting was... eerie. We looked at each other and asked why it was so... strange, and truly eerie. My son said it was the perfect setting for a zombie apocalypse. We see dusk and dawn and deeply overcast days often; What was so different about this lighting?
We decided it was the light quality. It was a “gray” light and we watched as color faded, leaving everything bathed in a “smoky” gray desaturated light. Since this was a mid-day event the shadows weren’t long like you’d see in the morning or evening, but short and faint. At totality -all 2+ minutes of it- things got dark enough to see some stars, and there was a “sunset”. It was a purple-red glow on the horizon but not just on one horizon; It was 360degrees. That was… weird. And very cool. Oh yes, the air got quite a chill to it too, and we put jackets on.
I’d read an article that claimed that animals can behave strangely during an eclipse. But the stories were anecdotal, and I was skeptical of many of them. One said that cows were reported to "all lie down”. Well since we were surrounded by Herefords and Angus we thought we’d wait and see.
We also had prairie sunflowers around us and if you’ve ever watched them they will turn to face the sun and follow it across the sky as the day progresses. We thought we’d check on them too. Nothing scientific; And I balked at setting up a time-lapse camera set-up. I was just going to enjoy the short-lived event with my family, and add my own anecdotes to the body of anecdotes out there.
Problem with all this anecdotal stuff, and the reason I am often skeptical (It’s been beaten into me over the years), is that all too often the observations don’t include what “normal” is, or simply what was happening before the “event”.
Here’s what the cattle did: At dawn they filed in to the waterhole, beneath a tall windmill. After tanking up they ran out to graze -literally. They exuberantly and playfully ran, bucked and bounced out into open range. They were really cute. Elk do this too, after being bedded up for a spell and with the early morning air being so cool.
Our cattle grazed until late morning, when the sun got hot (brilliant blue day), when they all laid down. Just like elk; Although elk lie down in cover, and the second the sun strikes them. At totality we glanced over and noticed that most of the cattle had stood back up. Cue to head to sleeping quarters, feeling a little “eerie”, or… just needing to stretch? Elk do this too; About late morning to mid-day they often stand up to stretch and feed a bit before lying back down. The cattle were not grazing, just standing there in what could have been taken for “feeling a little eerie”. So… I can’t say much about cattle behavior during total mid-day eclipses.
The sunflowers? Well... we noticed they were still facing the eclipsed sun. No surprise since they are not physically all that fast to begin with. Some, we noticed, had their petals a bit folded up. Some flowers close entirely by nightfall. But, we didn’t know if this variety of sunflower did. And, we noticed, only a few were so folded. Kinda like the cattle -not all were standing. Were those flowers so folded before the eclipse happened? We hadn’t really thought to notice what to notice beforehand.
All I can say is, it came and went pretty quickly, made us feel a bit “eerie", and then it was over, leaving us to feel like we didn't really have time to appreciate it. Oh yes, it caused my son to get all giddy and start running around wanting us to run too. But then again, he was doing that on and off well before the eclipsing began. In fact, he’s doing it right now! Gimme that foam sword boy and I’ll show you a thing or two!
