Four pairs of eyes... cause Im watching you too! These were yet another set of dull sky background shots and it seemed a no brainer to go full Black and White treatment. So there you go. Still, those Little egrets have some characters, I think. Really high up in that tall tree, in the marsh past platform 2, they just kept looking left and right and occasionally in my direction. Although through all the branches and trees and so far away, it seems impossible... which brings the question, how good are those birds vision, really...? Well accordingly to a books extract I just read (Herons, Egrets and Bitterns, their Biology and conservation in Australia, by Neil McKilligan), I quote: Herons are visual predators and like others birds they have very large eyes in proportion to their head size. Their eyes have two remarkable properties. The first is a very wide visual field that is almost panoramic on the vertical plane and encompass about 320 degrees on the horizontal plane. The 40-degree blind spot is behind the head but it can be reduced to only 10-20 degrees by the bird diverging its eyes, albeit at the expense of the arc of binocular vision at the front. The second property, not unique to herons, is its bifocal vision whereby the lower part of the visual field can be focused on the ground in front of its feet when the upper part is focused on more distant surroundings. Thus it can be searching for food close by and also scanning further afield for anything that might threaten it. Birds have colour vision. Needless to say I did not know that... fascinating! Hope you like them :-) 1 - two looking left, one right 2 - two looking right, one left 3 - I can see you!
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 23:09:44 +0000