unless the day is very cloudy, or the eclipse is happening near sunrise or sundown, Nobody would notice an eclipse was happening until the moment of totality.

Right up until the moment the moon fully eclipses the disk of the sun, the sun is too bright to look at directly, and the sky is only noticeably darker if you're looking carefully. (Remember: Most of the atmosphere is mostly unshadowed, and is still being lit up by most of the sun.) We had a relatively thick overcast here this afternoon, and even at 80% totality PLUS the overcast, the sun was too bright to look at, and if you tried you just saw a big blob of light, the same as any other day. I've actually witnessed a total eclipse, and it wasn't even all that dark DURING totality.

The only time anybody is going to be staring at the sun during an eclipse, other than during totality, is when:
A. The sun is rising or setting, and is thus dimmed by dust in the atmosphere. Of course the sun is ALWAYS rising or setting somewhere, and an eclipse takes a long while to happen -- so I suppose lots of people may have an opportunity to see the sun partially occluded, and perhaps be so fascinated that they blind themselves, but the time scale of the event would be such that they would barely notice the motion of the shadow across the sun. Few would have the opportunity to observe the transition to totality.
or
B. There is a thick enough cloud cover that you can look directly at the sun and see it clearly as a white disk through the clouds. Eclipses are rare enough without demanding special weather conditions to watch them.

It's slightly surprising that enough people ever witnessed total solar eclipses that there are any significant records of the events, because outside of conditions A and/or B, the only people who would even have known there was something afoot would be people living along the band of totality, and for them, the sun would not have slowly been eaten by a creeping monster, it would have simply gone dark, quite suddenly, and then 2 minutes later flared back up into something they couldn't look at. When word of what had happened reached the nearest city, the priests and officials would have been baffled, because they wouldn't have recently noticed anything odd about the sun.

a natural state for our state. I watch NASA, yawn.

The sun was extremely bright this morning. I am usually out this time of the day finishing up irrigation to beat the heat. Went and got sunglasses since the reflection off bright paint and metal was causing spots to form in my eyes. No burning heat from the sun as usually experienced this time of day.

As the sun started disappearing small changes to light and temperature. The hens slowed their activity and started standing around. The rooster went on his guard duty, no eating hyper alert and standing as tall as he could gazing around. The sheep when to their night pen. Cattle and donkeys no reaction. Dogs were in the house - no reaction.

At about 95-99% total silence, no birds and the few flies disappeared. 100% the traffic stopped on the highway.

As the sun started reappearing the chickens began their early morning routine of running around the shop to find their favorite watering spot. Background sounds of traffic and birds reappeared. By the time 25% of the sun reappeared the chickens were foraging normally and the flies were back.