How Birds See The World As Compared To Humans

 

Thanks to ultraviolet vision, birds see the world differently. In a very different way.

Birds have the amazing ability to see a spectrum of colors that are invisible to humans.

 In 2007, scientists used a spectrophotometer to analyze the colors of 166 species of North American songbirds that had no apparent physical difference between the sexes.

 They were in amazed by what they found, to say the least.

Image Credit : Joel Sartore

From a human perspective, in 92 percent of species, both males and females appear identical.

 However, the study showed that these birds have colors that are simply undetectable by our eye and that they use those colors to differentiate their genders by.

Image Credit : Klaus Schmitt

As it turned out, birds are tetrachromatic, they see four colors: UV, blue, green and red, while humans are trichromatic and can only see three colors: blue, green, red.

Hence the differences in vision demonstrated by these images.

(Note that the UV magenta 'color' shown here has been chosen to make it visible to us humans, it is a 'false color' by definition, UV light has no color.)

Image Credit : Cynthia Tedore

In another experiment, the scientists placed Chats of dissected males and females in the wild to see how live birds reacted.

The wild Chats attacked the stuffed male and tried to win over the stuffed female, meaning the birds were actually seeing something the scientists didn't see.

The 'bird's eye view' has much more than the panorama.

Source : Nature, NWF, demilked