Though eagle eyes are the same size and weight as human eyes, an eagle usually weighs around 10 pounds. Imagine turning your head to the side continually to scan the earth beneath you, and, after locating your prey, looking straight ahead and diving in for the kill. When an object is close, they are likely to look straight at it and view it head-on, but as it becomes more distant, they scrutinize it by turning their heads to the side. Eagles move their heads every five secondsĮagles move their heads to the left, right or straight ahead every five seconds, according to a Duke University study. They are also capable of using binocular and monocular vision, and they see a three-dimensional world the way we do. Though not as lateral as other birds, their eyes are fixed and unmoving in their sockets, angled 30 degrees from the midline of the face.Īs a result, eagles have a 340-degree visual field compared to our 180 degrees. We need both eyes in order to see a complete three-dimensional image.Īn eagle’s eyes are more to the sides of the head. Our eyes are on the front of our head, giving us excellent binocular vision but poor peripheral vision. “Their lateral fovea is used more for distance vision.” Eagle eyes are on the sides of their heads for a reason “Their central fovea is for close inspection,” Hodos explains. You might compare an eagle’s eye to a modern computer screen, with densely studded pixels giving extraordinary clarity and sharpness to every image. Not only do eagles have two foveae per eye, each is packed with a million cones per millimeter. In a human, he explains, each fovea has 200,000 cones per millimeter. That depth allows eagles’ eyes to act much like a telephoto lens to capture images. The fovea in an eagle is like a convex, deep pit, according to Hodos, and in humans, it’s like a shallow bowl. In the center of the retina is a special area called the fovea where the cones are incredibly densely packed. The eagle’s vision “is so far superior to ours that we can only try to imagine what their world must look like,” says William Hodos, an expert in bird vision and a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Maryland.īoth human and eagle eyes are built like a camera with a lens, containing light- and color-detecting cells on the retina called cones. So how does an eagle do it? How are its eyes like our own, and how are they different? Will technology and science ever help us catch up to the eagle and bring us our own version of raptor vision? Maybe so! How good is eagle vision? No wonder we use the term “eagle eyes” to describe superb vision. That means that what looks sharp and clear to us at 5 feet is just as clear to an eagle from 20 feet away. If you had an eagle’s ultraviolet light perception, you could track a tiny vole from the sky by the UV rays reflected from its urine.Īnd while most humans have 20/20 vision, eagles are blessed with an astounding 20/5 vision. If you were an eagle, you could see a rabbit running from three miles away. Of all the eyes nature has ever produced, those of the eagle - with its large, hooked beak, pale yellow iris and powerful talons - may be the most extraordinary.Įmbedded on either side of its face, an eagle’s eyes give it nearly panoramic vision.
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