This was a great article, a real fantastic demonstration of basic science —> innovation

Your kids were published ON THE COVER

Check out this podcast about the paper, which speaks to the joys of community science, teamwork, and quantitative wondering: www.science.org/content/podc...

This post makes me so happy!!!! Thanks Chris!!

Learn more in this fun podcast convo with Sarah Crespi | Science | www.science.org/content/podc... (17/x)

I’m so proud of Liz Aguilar, the team + the community scientists who leaned in animal behavior during the eclipse. Quoting one of them, “[This experience] was even cooler because [we] were more tuned in to the natural world.” Me too, friend! Most fulfilling project of my career so far. (16/x) #NSF

It had been (is) a brutal month (year) for basic science, making this project especially bittersweet. (15/x) #NSFfunded This article is a nice overview from @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird...

Fast forward to March '25, finalizing the ms: Liz, Dustin, Isaac & I spent our days laughing & leaning in to the joy of discovery @juncowren.bsky.social @imillercrews.bsky.social. (14/x) #TeamworkMakesTheDreamwork

I’ll never forget the moment (July 21, 2024) when we completed the 1st big validation and saw initial results. Lots of texting and ‘h*oly shit’ and ‘woah’ with co-senior author @juncowren.bsky.social at Ohio Wesleyan. At that point, we were meeting almost weekly to pull it all together. (13/x)

Probably equally cool, almost half of birds species were insensitive. Might they be the ones who are also least sensitive to urbanization and light pollution? (12/x)

The results amazed us: even a four-minute “night” was enough to trigger dawn-like singing in the species that also had a dawn chorus on a normal day. The app data show that other behaviors were also affected and that the results apply way beyond Bloomington. (11/x)

All of this required a bunch of validations because it would’ve taken forever to quantify all this data with artificial intelligence. We used BirdNET, and showed it was consistent with what an expert birder recorded for a subset of recordings. BirdNET is incredible! (10/x) birdnet.cornell.edu

Birders know that birds have a consistent onset/offset of their dawn and dusk behavior and we were able to quantify that for 52 species. Case in point: robins have a burst of song before first light each day. (9/x)

We also created a Plan B: automated recorders around Bloomington, collecting data on bird vocalizations before, during, and after totality. We used other days that week as “controls", and morning and evening data to compare eclipse behavior to behavior during normal changes in light. (8/x)

We were floored by the public participation! Close to 11,000 observations, from ~1,700 users! Mainly along path of totality. (7/x)