Birds and Dogs Give Advance Warning of Nepal Quake

Moments before the ground shook in Nepal, a flock of birds flew up and dogs started barking.
“It was like time slowed down to a snail’s pace,” said Jacquie Eales, 51, an Edmonton resident and University of Alberta research manager who was on vacation in Nepal when the earthquake struck.
“There was no rumbling sound, it just moved. I looked at my friend. He’s Nepali and there was a panicked look on his face. He came running toward us and pushed us near a truck. We were hanging onto the truck and the ground was just moving. People were screaming and running and there was panic.”
Eales flew out of Nepal that same day. Her flight was one of only two that weren’t cancelled.
“There’s a deep sense of gratitude. Things happen for a reason and we don’t know why or how we got through the earthquake unscathed,” she told the Edmonton Journal. “We thank our lucky stars we made it out. It was the longest 36 hours I’ve ever lived through. I couldn’t get home fast enough.”
Eales’ anecdotal evidence of animals predicting the earthquake moments before it hit aligns with a recent international study that documented changes in wild animal behaviour before seismic events.
Scientists set up motion-triggered cameras in Yanachaga National Park in Peru, and found “significant changes” in animal behaviour — sightings decreased significantly — more than three weeks before 2011’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the area.
The study found that rats had the most fine-tuned internal warning systems — they disappeared completely eight days before the earthquake — while ground-dwelling birds and armadillos also showed evidence of hiding prior to the quake.



An earlier study even noted that lab rats’ sleeping patterns changed ahead of earthquakes.

In the five to seven days before the earthquake, no animal movements were recorded at all, “an unusual phenomenon in a mountainous rainforest region normally teeming with wildlife,” CNN reported.

“As far as we know, this is the first time that motion triggered cameras have documented this phenomenon prior to an earthquake,” Dr. Rachel Grant, study author and lecturer in animal and environmental biology at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, told the Daily Mail.

Some researchers believe this change in animal behaviour is linked to an increase in positive ions in the air, generated by stressed rocks below the earth’s surface prior to an earthquake, which create an imbalance known as “serotonin syndrome.”

“People can get headaches, nausea, anxiety and restlessness. We think the animals are moving away from this concentrated source of positive ions,” Grant, told CNN. "Animals, in general, will move away from unpleasant stimuli.”

In the days before a massive earthquake struck China in 2008, thousands of toads hopped across the streets in one of the hardest-struck provinces. In the hours before the earthquake, zoo animals began to act strangely: zebras hit their heads on doors, lions were awake when they should have been sleeping, and peacocks started screeching.

Grant emphasized that she doesn’t believe animals have a sixth sense when it comes to predicting earthquakes, only that they are generally more sensitive than humans in responding to their changing environment.

She hopes to further her research by studying zooplankton, investigating the biological changes in sea creatures prior to an earthquake.

“I want to measure lake water and that could potentially be a bio-indicator of earthquakes — these marine animals are very sensitive to chemical changes in the water,”


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