Last October, the cover of the international journal Science featured a haunting picture of a bird in flight during a total solar eclipse. The story was a large-scale study of bird behaviour during the 2024 eclipse across North America.
Researchers using recordings and public observations discovered that 29 of the 52 bird species showed changes in their usual patterns of singing and behaviour during the eclipse. Some “dawn chorus” performers burst into song while others fell completely silent – only to erupt into a synchronised false dawn chorus when it passed, as if a new day was dawning.
An observational study of animals at the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia, South Carolina, during the 2017 solar eclipse suggested that just 2½ minutes of near-total darkness was enough to trigger unusually anxious activity among the animals.
At the height of it the male of the gorilla group charged the surrounding glass. The giraffes formed tight huddles near the entrance to their evening barn, swaying and group galloping. All four Galápagos tortoises suddenly became more active, moving faster and dispersing in different directions.
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Afterwards a giraffe and a female baboon continued to pace around for an hour. The old Galápagos tortoises all gazed up at the sky.
As will we. Possibly. Solar eclipses are a celestial phenomenon that are not unique to us on planet Earth, but ours are unusually spectacular. Ireland’s will not be total – the next one of those will be in 2090 – but it will be dramatic, the deepest to darken our path since 1999.
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Although tens of thousands of special eclipse glasses have been sold by Astronomy Ireland magazine in the past few weeks, it’s fair to say that some are more excited than others. Maybe it’s the existential weather moodiness but it takes proper organisation and enthusiasm to check out Met.ie’s satellite pictures (which refresh every 15 minutes) to find a cloudless viewing point somewhere between 6pm and 8pm on Wednesday while remembering to bring your special glasses. Or maybe it’s the fact that another two partial eclipses will be along in the next 18 months. Or that a total eclipse will be happening a few hours’ flight south across swathes of northern and eastern Spain and the Balearics, the likes of which hasn’t been witnessed there in more than 120 years.
Somosierra, a small village of 93 inhabitants that sits at an altitude of 1,440m north of Madrid, is suddenly a huge attraction offering one minute and 29 seconds of clear-skied total eclipse. Spain is taking it seriously. The Somosierra council has hired the astrotourism company El Nocturnario to train local volunteers.
Eclipses were recorded in ancient Egypt as long as 4,500 years ago, yet our ancient Irish ancestors were way ahead of them, according to Irish archaeo-astronomer Paul Griffin. The world’s oldest known solar eclipse, he has deduced, was recorded in stone by Irish Neolithic astronomer priests more than 5,000 years ago in Loughcrew, Co Meath
The Spanish government has set up a special committee to oversee the forthcoming trio of eclipses with a plan to put Spain “at the centre of global astronomical observation and astrotourism”. Wednesday’s spectacular alone is expected to bring in nearly €350 million in extra tourist revenue.
Only a year ago companies such as El Nocturnario seemed ridiculously overexcited, but perhaps someone finally took a look at North America’s great eclipse movement of April 2024.
A New York Times writer described it as “one of the greatest one-day migrations in history”, when “humans flocked by the millions to a swath of North America that was briefly cast in a shadow of darkness and wonder. They crowded into airplanes, buses and trains, braved traffic jams and slept in overpriced hotels, in tents and in their cars. For a cosmic moment, they were connected across the millennia with every other person who has ever experienced an eclipse, witnessing the light die and then be reborn as a dazzling ring”.
Across big cities, small towns and tiny remote villages, in parks, on mountaintops and alongside rivers that lay in the totality path through Mexico, Canada and the US, visitors gathered for family-friendly eclipse festivals with drum circles, meditation, wine tastings and dancing in the streets. The Texan border city of Eagle Pass, better known for migrant inundations, held a three-day music festival. Russellville had its Total Eclipse of the Heart festival where more than 100 couples were married in a giant ceremony minutes before the eclipse. In Cleveland, Nasa held a festival at the Great Lakes Science Centre.
They grasped the rarity and wonder of that spine-tingling connection with the ancients across aeons of life on Earth.
Eclipses were recorded in ancient Egypt as long as 4,500 years ago, yet our ancient Irish ancestors were way ahead of them, according to Irish archaeoastronomer Paul Griffin. The world’s oldest known solar eclipse, he has deduced, was recorded in stone by Irish Neolithic astronomer priests more than 5,000 years ago in Loughcrew, Co Meath, in a passage tomb older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza. Griffin’s claim is contested but it reflects an age-old fascination with a rather spooky celestial phenomenon. Shakespeare’s multiple references to eclipses represent them as cosmic portents of chaos, evil, betrayal and societal breakdown.
Perhaps our approach is more muted not just because of the weather but because we ingested some of that Shakespearean dread. And maybe he was on to something.
For all our technological advances, Wednesday evening will bring millions of human beings together to gaze in silent awe at a celestial phenomenon that still conveys something of a dark, supernatural energy: a natural occurrence that casts an eerie shadow thousands of kilometres long across Earth while immersing parts of it in near total darkness.
And brings with it a reminder of who is the ultimate boss.
