Are there any animal behaviors that can be used to predict weather conditions within a 24 hr time period?
There are many folklore tales of animals being used to predict weather. Just a few examples from the Old Farmers Almanac:
When cats sneeze, it is a sign of rain.
If the mole digs its hole 2½ feet deep, expect severe weather; if two feet deep, not so severe; if one foot deep, a mild winter.
Bats flying late in the evening indicates fair weather.
I have not been able to find much evidence to back these tales that I have come across. However, although not necessarily a prediction, the relationship of a cricket's chirp to temperature does seem to show how in tune animals can be with weather conditions. In fact, this relationship is also known as Dolbear's law, named after the American physicist Amos Dolbear, who published an article on the subject called The Cricket as a Thermometer. It is expressed as:
Tf=50+(N60-40/4)
where Tf is degrees in Fahrenheit and N60 is chirps per minute
It is generally believed that Dolbear observed the snowy tree cricket to come up with his equation. The formula is believed to be accurate to within a degree or so for the field cricket. Generally speaking, the relationship is believed to hold true because as temperature rises, the cold blooded cricket's metabolism will also rise, providing more energy for muscle contractions and thus for chirping.
Are there observable behaviors to look for in animals that can be a harbinger of changing weather conditions? For example, say you are on a 2-3 day hike with no way to access weather forecasts and somehow you forgot to check the forecast before leaving.
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Kind of. Most things associated with animals end up being old wives tales. The phenomena don't really have anything to do with weather or the climate at all. i.e. Cows laying down in fields means rain, the width of the strip on woolly bear caterpillers predicts the severity of the winter.
Other things can give an indication of current conditions. For example, birds flying low means that a storm is coming. This is due to the changing pressure of storm systems. https://phys.org/news/2013-11-birds-weather-adjust-behaviour-barometric.html
Here are links to other proverbs on animal behavior in relation to the weather:
https://www.almanac.com/content/how-birds-predict-weather#
https://www.almanac.com/content/can-animals-predict-weather-animal-proverbs
So animal observations can provide some extra information, so that along with other observations can give a small sense of weather. Many of the proverbs came about through observation before we had good weather forecasts.
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Two of my three dogs hate thunderstorms. (The third dog is a bit simple.) I can tell by their behaviour one to three hours before a storm hits that they want to go back to the house and stay inside. Given canine hearing I suspect that they are hearing distant thunder. They are discriminating. Rumbling from the local coal mine, jets flying overhead don't bother them.
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