The Science Pawdcast

Episode 30 Season 7: How A Solar Eclipse Changed Bird Behaviour And What Kids Get Wrong About Dogs

• Jason and Kris Zackowski • Season 7 • Episode 30

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The sky went dark at midday, the temperature dipped, and a continent held its breath. We chased the total solar eclipse to Texas and came back with more than a memory—fresh science on how birds react when day vanishes and returns a few minutes later. Leveraging a blend of community observations, autonomous recorders, and BirdNET machine learning, researchers tracked behavior from Mexico to Canada and found a clear pattern: movement slowed during totality while vocalizations spiked, followed by a pseudo-dawn burst when the light returned. Some species, like American Robins and Barred Owls, showed dramatic shifts; others didn’t budge, pointing to species-specific sensitivity to light.

That sudden flip from light to dark is more than a spectacle—it’s a powerful biological cue. We connect the dots to artificial light at night, from migration disruptions to window strikes, and explore how city lighting policies and dark-sky practices can protect wildlife without sacrificing safety. When the whole sky changes at once, you see how deeply behavior is tuned to brightness. It’s a rare, elegant experiment you can’t reproduce in a lab, and it gives us practical guidance for urban design and conservation.

Back on the home front, we turn to a concern every family with pets and kids faces: children often misread dog body language. New data show that four- to seven-year-olds frequently mistake angry dog faces for happy ones, with high error rates even at seven. Most bites happen at home, during child-initiated contact, and without supervision. We share simple, actionable steps—teach a few key cues, keep greetings calm, supervise play, and give dogs guaranteed safe spaces—to preserve the empathy and comfort dogs bring while lowering risk.

If you love science, animals, and practical insights that make life better, this one’s for you. 

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SPEAKER_00:

Uh Hello science enthusiasts. I'm Jason Zakowski.

SPEAKER_02:

And I'm Chris Zakoski.

SPEAKER_00:

We're the pet parents of Bunsen, Beaker, Bernoulli, and Ginger.

SPEAKER_02:

The science animals on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right spot. So put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail.

SPEAKER_01:

This is the Science Podcast. Just a heads up, I screwed up this episode with my mic settings, so you'll my audio is not the best. Chris sounds great. Hello, welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. This is episode 30 of season seven. Chris, another week. Another week on strike.

SPEAKER_02:

It has been another week on strike. You're absolutely correct.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Very surreal feeling. We went to a rally today. That was exciting.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we did. It was a great turnout, and they had a barbecue after, so we got to talk to some of our colleagues that we don't necessarily see all of the time. And that was unfortunate for the reason why we were there, but it was great to connect with our colleagues for sure.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Good turnout, and there's a lot of public support. That's great. Not to get too down, but it is sucky that we're on strike, but it's part of our life. Um, it is giving us a lot more time with the dogs. I don't know if they're gonna be ready for when we go back.

SPEAKER_02:

I was talking to other dog parents about that. They're like, our dogs are gonna go through withdrawal.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And I think, and I think they are, but we've been filling their day with fun walks in different areas of the city. That's been really enjoyable for me.

SPEAKER_01:

Lily and Beaker have a busy life when we're in school, anyways, because we do take them to doggy daycare. Um, and they're go all day. They're busy when we're in school or not. Maybe they're just like there's more us time with them, which has been nice. That's been good.

SPEAKER_02:

That's my favorite part of the day is just downtime with the dogs. And every morning I get to snuggle with Beaker, and she just lays with me, and I get to pet her, and she just gives me this warm energy. I just love it. I just love it. It reminds me when I taught online, taught from home, and I got to hang out with the dogs all day. It was just Beaker and Bunsen then, but Beaker every day, her and I. I could mark from the couch and I would sit with her and we would snuggle. So I'm gonna go through withdrawal when I'm back at work.

SPEAKER_01:

She's a sweetie. She's just a sweet dog. All right, what's on the show this week? In Science News, Chris, you found a really fun article about birds do during the um great American eclipse and how their, I guess their singing changed.

SPEAKER_02:

We're gonna talk about it more, but it's just a way to think about and research how animals respond to their environment. And it's really cool in that aspect.

SPEAKER_01:

And in pet science, maybe on the heels of our guest we had last week, who talked about some of the there's some concerns when you have small children in the house with dogs. And this study's kind of all about that, about how children aren't really ready to be around dogs unsupervised because they just don't know how dogs are supposed to act, they don't have enough life experience.

SPEAKER_02:

Do you do you remember Melissa? I'll be nice to those puppies, I promise.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, they can't.

SPEAKER_02:

I'll be nice to those puppies.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, little kids don't know. You have to teach them how to be to a dog with proper supervision. Yeah, but let's get on with the show because there's no time lake.

SPEAKER_02:

Science time.

SPEAKER_01:

This weekend's science news, it's all about birds singing during the solar eclipse. Now, you and I took time off school. We went and saw the eclipse in Texas.

SPEAKER_02:

We sure did. And you flew, we flew out on the Saturday. You're like, let's fly out on the Saturday. And I said, Are you sure? And you said that would be a great day to fly out. Are you sure, Jason? April 6th, that's a great day to fly. And you said, Yep, I don't want to fly any other day. And that was my birthday, so I got to fly out to Texas on my birthday. But the solar eclipse was on the 8th.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's right. Um, amazing. It was an amazing experience. I'm very glad I've never seen one in my entire life. They come around in your location on Earth, maybe once in your entire life, sometimes never. And I was like, it's time for me to see one and see what they're all about. And it was pretty spectacular.

SPEAKER_02:

I had a really great time too. It was a lot of fun going down there. We got to see a really fun show, and we got to see the spectacular, I want to say light show, but it wasn't. It was a lack of light show with the totality of the eclipse. And I wanted to wear certain colors of clothing because I heard that if you wear red, that it's muted or green. And so we definitely picked up some lawn chairs, and I wore a red shirt just to test that. But birds actually depend on light cues as well. To but birds actually depend on light cues to time daily and seasonal behaviors, like they're singing, like they're feeding, and roosting. And like you said, totality occurs at a given site only once every 300 to 400 years. Most wild birds actually have never experienced such an abrupt day-to-night to back-to-day transition. So the researchers they used community science, so you know, avid bird watchers, and they used autonomous sound recorders and also something called BirdNet, which was a machine learning that quantified bird responses all the way from Mexico to Canada.

SPEAKER_01:

So the folks that to the published this in science wanted to know what happened with birds during the eclipse. The, as you said, they used community science, which is a solar, they used an app they built called Solar Bird. It's an app for your phone. You can use it with no bird watching experience. And they logged over 11,000 observations from 1,174 users in the path of totality. So where the moon went right in front of the sun. You observe the bird for 30 seconds, and then you check a little behavior boxes, which include singing and flying and eating, and then the app automatically calculated which eclipse phase you were in using GPS and Timestat. So that was cool. They were able to commandeer a whole swath of people in the path of totality that started in Mexico and ended up in Canada. You mentioned those autonomous recording units, those were in southern Indiana. So they set them up only in one place and they tracked bird sounds there during the eclipse. And then that AI system, BirdNet, identified from those recordings a whole schwack of vocalizations from 52 different species, and then compared them with what birds do on a normal daily basis without the weird eclipse. So there's a whole lot of data they had to parse out. You want to talk key results?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So with that data, they found some community science findings. So the vocalizations rose sharply during totality, which they found more singing and more birds calling. But flying and other behaviors that are visible, they dropped significantly, probably because birds settled to roost or there was low visibility during the totality. And then after totality, both vocalizations and flight activity increased again, which mirrored Sado, which mirrored pseudo-dawn burst. And areas actually outside the path of totality, the ones that received partial eclipses, showed no significant changes.

SPEAKER_01:

And just from just from us experiencing it, like it got dark. I was shocked how dark it got. Like I knew it was going to get dark when totality happened, but I was actually stunned how dark it got.

SPEAKER_02:

But cold too. So we were sitting next to some.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. We were sitting next to some people and they were all set up. They had this humongous thermometer, and they had like their camera was set up. I was like really impressed that these community scientists set up all of this apparatus, and it dropped, uh, was it 10 degrees?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it was in Fahrenheit. Yeah, Fahrenheit.

SPEAKER_02:

So yeah, we're not quite sure.

SPEAKER_01:

It got colder.

SPEAKER_02:

And because we felt colder, and my shirt was doing the changing color. It was pretty cool. It became more muted.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So I can imagine if you were a bird and it got instantaneously that dark and cold, you're like, it's time to go, it's nighttime. It just would make sense, I guess. Now they did have the AI field recorder findings that they had to go through. Of the 52 species detected, 29 showed significant behavior changes. 11 species increased their vocalization before totality, and 12 species changed during totality. Half increased, half decreased. 19 species behavior altered after, mostly increased singing. So the singing kind of changed as totality happened and after totality. And then specifically, the American Robin vocalization was five times higher during the eclipse and six times higher after. And remember, they're using that the AI field recorders to compare with control, which would have been the day before no eclipse. And the barred owl had four times more calls after totality. So there was about a 50% increase in observed species showing some kind of disruption due to the light change. So that's cool. That's really good data.

SPEAKER_02:

So do we just want to go to the ecological and biological implications?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, let's skip down there. Yep.

SPEAKER_02:

So what they found were several ecological and biological implications through this study. The return of light is a particularly strong biological cue. Even that four-minute quote unquote night of totality can reset a bird's behavior. And that confirms that circadian rhythms in many species are tightly driven to light. Roughly half of the species were unaffected, which suggests maybe species-specific differences in light sensitivity. And it provides a rare, large-scale natural test of light mechanisms, unlike what they can do in the lab with light and darkness.

SPEAKER_01:

The whole sky turned dark versus a couple birds you have in your lab.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. Exactly. And it offers insight into the ecological impacts of artificial light at night. I actually just saw an advertisement for the Dark Skies conference in Jasper, and it just made me reflect on all the things that they do to keep that a dark sky preserve. And I know you bug me about putting leaving the outside light on because you're like, it bugs the moths. It's not good for them. Yeah. That whole idea of light impacting birds is prevalent. And that that could cause similar disruptions on a global scale. Birds can crash into buildings based on light cues. They could get off of migration patterns based on light cues. So it's a strong ecological implication of light.

SPEAKER_01:

And I guess the flip side of that is half of the birds appear to be not affected by it. Right? Like the half of the birds, the sun goes away and they're like, oh, whatever. Just keep on doing what they're doing. Uh yeah. It'd be interesting. I was thinking about this when we left because we didn't have Bernoulli yet, right? This was last year before, a month or two before we got Bernoulli as a little goober. Um, it would be so cool to have the dogs outside and then just watch have a camera on them to see what they would do. Like what would have Bunsen and be? Would they have been unaffected by it? Or would they have changed their behavior? You know?

SPEAKER_02:

I don't know, but there's gonna be a solar eclipse in our neck of the woods coming out of the world.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, when is that? When is that?

SPEAKER_02:

Wasn't it like 2028?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh man, we're gonna be so old.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh wow. No, wasn't it 2044?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, like it's 2044, Chris. That's we're gonna be old.

SPEAKER_02:

No, I thought it was a lot sooner for us. I'll have to look it up again.

SPEAKER_01:

No, the next total eclipse visible from Alberta will be August 22nd. So a couple days after my birthday, on 2 2044, there will be a partial eclipse on 2026, on August 12th. We'll get the Europe will get totality.

SPEAKER_02:

So watch the skies and the behavior of your pets.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, that's science news for this week. This week in Pet Science, we're gonna look at a study published in the Anthrozoos. It's concluded kids get animal behavior wrong, and it can sometimes have bad outcomes. Now, we've had lots of little kids around our dogs, but what do we do when we have small children around dogs? We don't just let them go.

SPEAKER_02:

No, we definitely we supervise.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we watched.

SPEAKER_02:

And Melissa has made a comment about how we're more heightened and more protective just to make sure that the dogs and the kids interact in a positive way. And she had a little bit of a negative thing because it's she's it's not Rafi's fault that he's four or five or six and he is the way he is. Excitable wants to run around with the dog, wants to be chased by the dog. But like for us, we want to have well-adjusted dogs. And like you said, it's hard to the kids don't necessarily understand the cause and effect of their actions where they think the dog is playing appropriately when it's not. And we definitely want our dogs to be on their best behavior and basically bomb proof in whatever situation that they find themselves in.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I would never think that the dogs would bite a kid or a small child, but you never know. It just takes a toddler to fall over on a dog and hurt them the wrong way and they snip back. Like you you'd hope that would never happen, but that's always in the back of my head because dogs are animals, right? You can't get in their head and know 100% of the time what they're thinking. Exactly. Before we get to some of the risk outlined in the study, human-dog interactions are extremely positive for kids. They help teach kids empathy, they help reduce stress, all of these, they even improve their academic performance. I shared actually today on Chris on our story on Instagram, kindergarten or kindergarten class got classroom puppies. Um I know the little kids were a couple little kids started crying, they were so overcome with emotion seeing the puppies, and they were reading books to the little puppies, right? They all got to take a turn in with the puppies and read books, which is really sweet. And dogs are a very common pet. Like in Canada, they're what is it, 30, 33% of homes have a dog, 40% in the United States, 31% in the United Kingdoms, and very high in parts of Latin America. So you have lots and lots of dogs everywhere. Now, the flip side of that is despite these, despite all these this good news, um, dog bites are a big problem globally. You have high costs in some places, if because there's some places where if you get bit and there's some damage, you may not have insurance. And small children are disproportionately affected. And the injuries they sustain are usually bad.

SPEAKER_02:

So that's the often with their face or head injuries, but then they have a PTSD risk after a severe bite. Yeah. So talking with the benefits of the human-dog interaction, like you're saying, the dog bites are a growing public concern. And UK hospitals have noticed triple the bites from 1997 to 1998. There were 2,915 bites up to 9,366 in 2022 to 2023. And children consistently have the highest incident rates. So one thing that might coincide is during the pandemic. So dog ownership during the pandemic increased. From the United Kingdom, it went from 23% to 33% to about 34% from 2020 to 2022, and they notice concurrent bite increases. So why and where are children bitten, Jay?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, most kids are bitten from the family's own dog, just in day-to-day interactions. 86% of the bites are triggered by child-initiated interactions, and usually they occur without parental supervision. One idea is that kids, little kids, they they bend toward the dog with their own face, and that's why they get bit in the face. Like little kids are really curious. The next time you're with a toddler, watch how they look at things. They bend forward and squat to look at them. Like they get right up in there. Whereas if you think of an adult, like would you stick your face into the face of a dog? Probably not.

SPEAKER_02:

Um definitely not a dog I don't trust.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly. Not a dog you don't know. But so I guess this is a family dog. But more often than not, as adults, we say hello to the dog, but we pet them. Of course, of course, I think I've kissed our dogs probably 50 times today. So I am bending my face towards the dog, but it's from a different angle, right? I'm not at their level squatting down.

SPEAKER_02:

No, that's true. Because I had Bernoulli on one side of my leg and Bunsen on the other, and I was rubbing them, and I went down and I kissed their heads. I was up in their face, but I it wasn't me going towards them at their eye level. So yeah, that's that makes it a little bit different. And we're not as unpredictable. Yeah, kids are talking to the dog. Yeah, the kids are unpredictable, and I don't do quick and sudden movements.

SPEAKER_01:

So, what this study was looking at was examining how kids from four to seven and versus adults interpret dog and human facial expressions. So they were trying to figure out kids just get wrong dogs kind of their dog's facial behavior, right? Like we've been around angry dogs before, and you're like, that dog is angry, but perhaps a small child wouldn't clue in on that. So that's what they use. They used like angry dog faces, angry human faces, happy dog faces, happy human faces, and neutral dog human faces using photos. You were gonna say, Chris, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, but there is a core knowledge gap that they found. So children, not only children, actually many adults, poorly read dogs' body and facial signals, and actually having ownership or experience with dogs does not reliably predict their accuracy of being able to read the body or facial signals. So prior work, prior study shows frequent misreading of aggressive signals as happy and a limited understanding of neutral expressions in dogs. And that's kids and adults alike.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's interesting. I don't have any knowledge of that. What does a neutral dog face look like? I don't know. I'd have to probably, yeah, I guess so.

SPEAKER_00:

I guess so, beaker face.

SPEAKER_01:

They had 89 kids of between that age of four to seven and 30 adults. They gave them 24 black and white photos with the different emotions per series of different types of dogs and different folks, people in it, and they randomized it. Showed the test subjects the pictures and had them interpret the emotion happy, angry, or neutral. And I guess this is the crux of it. What did the study find, Chris?

SPEAKER_02:

They found that the angry dog faces, which is the most critical, there was major child misinterpretation in improving with age, but persisting at seven years. The four-year-olds, 67% misinterpreted angry dog faces. Five-year-olds was 70%, six-year-olds was 58%, whereas the seven-year-olds was the 46%, and the adults had one error, which was 0.8%.

SPEAKER_01:

Whoa. Okay. Not even close.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. Not even close. Four-year-olds, definitely five-year-olds, they're not interpreting an angry dog face, they just don't know. So the most common error in the children, they thought the angry dogs were happy as opposed to being angry dogs. Four-year-olds were 78% incorrect. They thought the angry dog was happy, and five-year-olds was higher at 86%, and then six-year-olds was lower at 66%, and then seven-year-olds it dropped off to the 43. So it seems like the five-year-olds is a sweet spot for very much misinterpretation.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. That's see, I knew it was going to be something like this until we we looked at the study. And even though I looked at it obviously before we started talking, it's just such a shocking percentage. Like kids, this is the big thing, is the kids don't know. They just don't have the life experience to get when a dog is upset.

SPEAKER_02:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

This is what the this is what the data says, and that's scary.

SPEAKER_02:

And I think that's why we were like hypersensitive.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Like with Rafi running around the house, jumping on the couch, Lee was chasing him, and they were having a great time. And it looked like they were having a great time, but I don't think Bernoulli ever had an angry face, let's be honest. But it could have gone badly. So that's why he could have puppy bit.

SPEAKER_01:

He could have bit Rafi, like as a puppy, but it would have hurt him, right?

SPEAKER_02:

And I guess that's different. I guess that is different because puppies are Bernoulli was like eight months.

SPEAKER_01:

He was almost full grown, but still a puppy.

SPEAKER_02:

So there's you know no, there were there's that humping video where Rafi's running outside.

SPEAKER_01:

When he was a little puppy, that's different than when he was running, because he's still he was doing that when he was I don't know, 70, 80 pounds.

SPEAKER_02:

And Bunsen. Like Rafi can rile up Bunsen running around the kitchen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Bunsen has a really cool relationship with Rafi, though. That's for sure. They have a neat, they have a neat relationship. Anyways, not to the point.

SPEAKER_02:

No, so they yeah, we'll just keep talking about what the study found. Angry human faces. So there were far fewer errors in children. They knew when a parent was angry, and they interpret human anger better than canine anger for sure. Happy faces, children and adults best were best at determining a happy human face, and happy dogs were harder. The youngest children missed interpreting a happy dog face. And then the neutral faces were hardest overall. So youngest children often performed poorly on both species, neutral expressions, both human and dog. Yeah. And adults still made some neutral face errors because a neutral face is often ambiguous.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So not to belabor the conclusion, but it's pretty self-explanatory. The practical conclusion is you need to watch your kids when they're around dogs. There is a huge safety gap. Kids just cannot read a dog. Little kids cannot read a dog when they're angry versus happy. And because of that, just watch your kids when they're around dogs. And even be like us, hovering to make sure there's no misinterpretation or there's no behavior by the dog on the little kid.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. And being preventative, that being making that prevention a priority. So teaching the facial and body signals, especially a conflict escalation. So if your dog has a wrinkled muzzle or they have their forward ears or they have a hard stare, their teeth are showing. Have the child clue into those are your dog is uncomfortable and it could escalate. But then also sometimes dogs will display behaviors where they're trying to diffuse it. So turning away and then lip licking or yawning. So those are signals that dogs are like, whoa, this is too much here. And then the kids sometimes they just don't interpret those. And so then they keep going, and then that's past the point of danger, right? Because the dog is trying to show, I'm trying to diffuse the situation, but I can't because it the child just keeps is relentless.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep. All this being said, don't be discouraged in not getting a dog if you're you've got little kids at home. Callan came home to us as a puppy when Adam was a little guy, and they had just the sweetest relationship. That was really cool for Adam and Duncan. Like, how old was Duncan when we got Callan? 12? 11? He was young. Yeah. So, you know, Callan has been gone for a while now, but like that was very cool for them to grow up with a dog. It was wonderful. Alright, that's pet science for this week. That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the Science Podcast. And a shout out to all the top dogs. That's the top tier of our Patreon community, The Pop Pack. You can sign up in our show notes. Alright, Chris, let's hear those names that are part of the Top Dogs.

SPEAKER_02:

Amelia Fete, Ree Oda, Carol Hanel, Jennifer Challen, Linnea Janet, Karen Cronister, Vicky Oteiro, Christy Walker, Sarah Brown, Wendy, Diane, Mason and Lou, Helen Chin, Elizabeth Boujois, Marianne McNally, Katherine Jordan, Shelly Smith, Laura Steffenson, Tracy Leinbaugh, Anne Uchida, Heather Burvach, Kelly, Tracy Halbert, Ben Rather, Debbie Anderson, Sandy Primer, Mary Rader, Bianca Hyde, Andrew Lynn, Brenda Clark, Brianne Hawes, Peggy McKeel, Holly Birch, Kathy Zurker, Susan Wagner, and Liz Button.

SPEAKER_00:

For science, empathy, and cuteness.