Some animals are crepuscular, meaning they are active at dawn and dusk.  Here is a little bit more information about what that term means and what animals exhibit this behavior.

I had never even heard of the word crepuscular before I recently did some research into nocturnal and diurnal. During that research I came across the fact that there are many animals that don’t fall neatly into one of those two categories. There are many animals, whose activity patterns, can best be described as being crepuscular.

When Are Animals Active?

As I talked about in another post most animals have regular activity patterns.  These are the times of day that they are usually sleeping, and awake, hunting or looking for food.

There are actually four main kinds of animal activity patterns – nocturnal, diurnal, cathemeral, and crepuscular.  You can read this old post to remember what cathemeral means.

What Does Crepuscular Mean?

This simply means that an animal is mainly active during twilight (when the sun is setting) and dawn (when the sun is rising).

Animals may choose this type of time to be active for a number of different reasons.  Remember though, everything that animals do is in order to give them the best chance at survival.  Keeping that in mind, some animals are active at twilight and dawn in order to avoid predators or because it is cooler at that time of day.

Predators have a harder time seeing at twilight and dawn because of the lighting.  This gives prey animals, such as rabbits, an advantage.

For animals that live in hot deserts it is simply too hot to be active during the heat of the day and the twilight and dawn are much cooler.

What Animals Are Crepuscular?

Many animals are active at twilight and dawn.  Some of the common ones include rabbits, deer, bears, skunks, bobcat, and possums.

Deer are a crepuscular animal that is active and looking for food at twilight and dawn.  Then during the middle of the day they tend to find a nice spot to lay down and rest.