somuchscience:Your Field Guide is Wrong: A Bird’s Eye View of the WorldBY JOE SMITH, Cool Green Scie
somuchscience:Your Field Guide is Wrong: A Bird’s Eye View of the WorldBY JOE SMITH, Cool Green Science Blog, Nature.orgAUGUST 17, 2015Your field guide is wrong. Many of North America’s birds are depicted incorrectly.OK, maybe that’s not quite right: your field guide would look wrong to a bird.If a bird paged through your field guide, it would wonder at how drab and dull the paintings look and would be puzzled at why the sexes are depicted alike in so many species when there are clear differences.Birds see the world differently than us. They see a whole range of colors that we can’t see – colors that are literally unimaginable to us.As a result of the vision differences between birds and people, we are missing stuff.Some of what we are missing was revealed in a 2007 study that reported a color analysis of the 166 North American songbird species whose sexes look alike. They used a spectrophotometer to measure color of male and female bird plumage across the full range of colors that birds can perceive.The findings were stunning. For the most part, these look-alikes only look alike to us.A full 92 percent of the species depicted as having look-alike sexes in your field guide actually have distinct plumage color differences.A sampling of our more common look-alike species includes red-eyed vireo, blue jay, American crow, tufted titmouse, black-capped chickadee, brown creeper, Carolina wren, wood thrush, mockingbird, and cedar waxwing.Males and females of all of these species have distinct, measurable plumage differences that we simply cannot see.Why can’t we see these differences? The answer is simple: birds’ heightened vision can discern a range of colors that we cannot perceive.Continue Reading… -- source link