OK, here's my solar eclipse review. First, a disclaimer: my phone camera is a piece of shit. Even though I was seeing the moon covering the sun (with the eclipse glasses on my eyes), the phone camera just sees a bright spot of light (even though I had the eclipse filter over the camera lens), and you get no detail. Even when the sun was nearly fully covered by the moon (as I saw through the glasses), it just looks like the regular, round sun with the camera/filter. So I'll have to wait until our local photographers post pictures.
But looking with my own eyes through the glasses, the moon had already started blocking a bit of the sun at 2:30 pm. From where we were (on our street), the moon was coming up from the 5 o'clock position (bottom right). It was a warm, sunny day, but eventually you could feel it getting cool, while things got darker. Eventually, the moon was completely covering the sun, except for a thin sliver on the left. The only bird sound was from a goldfinch, and it was strangely dark, but like a shadowy dark. And it's cold, like 10 degrees colder. It dropped from 60 to 50. And the shadows from the trees took on a crescent shape.
Slowly, the thin crescent of sun on the left was rotating to the bottom. Once it moved to the bottom, it started getting thicker, as it appeared that the moon was moving upward. But here's the wildest thing. As it got sunny again, I started hearing this growing cackle of birds. It seemed like thousands of birds sitting in trees, chattering. According to my Merlin app, they were common grackles, and maybe some red-winged blackbirds. Our neighbor and I watched as they started moving in waves. For a few minutes, the sky was black with thousands of birds. Then they all flew away.
