The August 12 Eclipse: What Happens to the Albufera's Wildlife When Night Falls at Teatime

On August 12 2026, the Moon will begin to cover the Sun over the Comunitat Valenciana at 19:38. Over the following hour, light levels will drop progressively, like a sunset brought forward. But the final stretch is where things turn strange: between 20:32 and 20:33, the Sun will disappear completely for just over a minute, and that last plunge in light will be far more abrupt than any normal sunset.

It's an astronomical event that will draw hundreds of thousands of people to the Valencian coast. But there's a question almost nobody is asking: what does the wildlife of the Albufera do when day turns into night without warning?

What the science says (not intuition)

For years, what was known about animal behaviour during eclipses was largely anecdotal — isolated observations, no method. That changed with the total eclipse over the United States in April 2024, when a research team from Indiana University deployed autonomous acoustic recorders and a citizen science app (SolarBird) along the path of totality. The result was the most comprehensive study of avian behaviour during an eclipse ever conducted: close to 10,000 citizen observations and nearly 100,000 recorded vocalisations.

The findings, published in Scientific Reports (Nature), are revealing:

• Of 52 species detected, 29 showed significant changes in their vocal behaviour at some point during the eclipse.
• In the minutes before totality, several species sang more than usual, as if perceiving the change in light as an alert.
• During the minutes of total darkness, some species fell completely silent while others became active, replicating dusk patterns.
• The most striking effect came afterwards, when light returned: many species entered what the researchers call a "false dawn chorus", singing as if a new day were beginning.

Other studies — in zoos, using weather radar, with ringing networks — point in the same direction: a large proportion of species, especially birds, interprets the sudden drop in light as the onset of night and adopts dusk behaviours: they stop feeding, seek roosting sites and reduce their activity.

What could happen at the Albufera

There are no previous studies of a total solar eclipse at this particular wetland — quite simply, such an event has never occurred here within the era of modern scientific observation. But knowing the usual behaviour of the Albufera's species in response to drops in light — storms, sunsets — it's reasonable to form some hypotheses:

• Herons and egrets: during normal sunsets, Grey Herons, Little Egrets and Night Herons fly from feeding areas to their communal roosts. During totality, they could initiate that movement and abandon it when light returns.
• Glossy Ibis: flocks of Glossy Ibis (Plegadis falcinellus) perform spectacular crepuscular flights at dusk, moving in dense formations towards the reedbeds. A false nightfall could trigger those same flights.
• Warblers and nightingales: reedbed species are highly sensitive to light levels. A sudden silence during totality is to be expected, and possibly a brief burst of song when light returns — the "false dawn chorus" documented in the 2024 study.
• Flamingos: the Albufera's flamingos tend to reduce activity as evening falls, clustering in shallow-water areas. They could adopt that resting posture during totality.
• Bats: in previous eclipses, bat activity during totality has been documented, with bats emerging briefly as if it were real dusk.

These are informed hypotheses, not certainties. And that's precisely what makes it so interesting: very few people in the world will be able to observe, in real time, how a complete Mediterranean wetland responds to an event like this.

The double deception: an eclipse that outlasts the sunset

There's one detail that makes this eclipse especially unusual for wildlife. According to data from Spain's National Geographic Institute (IGN), totality will occur with the sun at just 4.4 degrees above the horizon, and the eclipse will still be in progress when the sun sets at 21:01 — the Moon's final contact with the solar disc won't be complete until 21:24.

This means the Albufera's birds will experience a sequence without precedent: total darkness → partial return of light → actual sunset → night. It's a double light deception. Will the herons resume feeding after totality, only to have to return to their roosts twenty minutes later at real sunset? Will the warblers sing a "false dawn" and then fall silent again as true night arrives? No study has documented a scenario like this. Whatever happens at the Albufera that evening will be, literally, new science.

A recommendation, not a sales pitch

If you're going to be in the Albufera area that day, a naturalist's advice: take your attention away from the sky for a moment and lower it to the reedbeds. Listen for whether the usual afternoon buzz stops. Watch whether the flocks change direction. Those two minutes of strange silence could be as memorable as the eclipse itself.

Sources:
Aguilar et al., study on avian behaviour during the April 2024 total eclipse (Indiana University / SolarBird), published in Scientific Reports (Nature), 2025. Complementary study on continental-scale avian behavioural response, PNAS, 2025.