Learn Dutch: Door de storm zijn de dieren 's nachts nogal onrustig. - Due to the storm, the animals are quite restless at night.

It acts much like the English prefix "un-", turning the adjective rustig (calm or quiet) into its opposite, onrustig (restless or turbulent). In Dutch, on- is a highly productive prefix, meaning you can easily attach it to a wide variety of adjectives and participles to create negative versions (like onafhankelijk for independent, or onopvallend for inconspicuous).

Why does the sentence use door instead of omdat to mean "due to" or "because of"?

Door is a preposition, so it must be followed directly by a noun phrase, which in this case is de storm. Omdat is a conjunction, meaning it must introduce a full subordinate clause containing a subject and a verb sent to the end. To use it here, you would have to say something like: Omdat het stormt, zijn de dieren... (Because it is storming, the animals are...).

Why is the verb zijn placed before the subject de dieren?

This happens because of the Dutch V2 (verb-second) rule. The sentence starts with the prepositional phrase Door de storm, which takes up the entire first position. The conjugated verb zijn must stay in the second position, which forces the subject de dieren to move behind it (inversion).

What exactly does the 's in 's nachts stand for?