When Jessica Yorzinski chased nice-tailed grackles in a field, there was no contest to see who blinked first. But she wanted to wink at the birds.
Dr. Y. Yorjinski gave the outfit of pebbles, which look like crows but belong to another family of birds, with head-mounted cameras pointing back at their faces. Like other birds, pebbles flicker horizontally, clicking the translucent membrane next to the eye. Recordings show that birds spent less time fluttering during dangerous parts of the flight. The findings were published Wednesday in Biology Letters.
Dr. Yorzinski, a sensory ecologist at the University of Texas A&M, was amazed at how animals balance the need to blink with the need to get visual information about their environment.
Men, he said, “blink often, but when we do that we lose access to the world around us. I got the idea to think about what was happening in other species. “
She has worked with a company that makes eye-tracking tools for making custom bird-sized skulls. Because a bird’s eye is on the sides of its head, the contrasting one has a video pointing to the left eye and one to the right, making the bird look like a sports fan in a beer helmet. The headpiece was attached to a backpack with a battery and transmitter.
Dr. Yorzinski caught 10 wild great-tailed grackles to wear this get-up, which is common in Texas. She used only male birds, large enough to carry equipment without difficulty. Each bird wore a camera helmet and backpack while Dr. Yorzinski encouraged him to fly by chasing him in an outdoor enclosure.
After that, he snapped videos of the flight in stages until it took off and landed again. He said he had seen “clear examples”. When the birds were in flight, their wings were faster than they were on the ground. And before descending, they barely blink.
“The visual input they get during this crucial phase of landing and landing in flight makes the most sense,” he said. During a fast flight, colliding with another object can be devastating. Choosing a landing site is also risky. “If they had been a little farther, they would not have landed and would have fallen to the ground,” said Dr. Yorzinski.
He also noticed that the birds were mostly fluttering when they landed. This may have happened because they needed to blink after keeping their eyes open or to protect their eyes from corrosion. Dr. Yorzinski plans to do more experiments with birds, such as navigating different environments such as forest configurations with more obstacles.
Graham Martin, an emeritus professor of avian sensory science at the University of Birmingham in England, said the study was “an interesting part of the work”. But he pointed out that the flights Dr. Yorzinski observed were only a few seconds long. He doesn’t think there’s enough evidence to say anything about how birds can change their flicker in flight.
“I think we need to look at blinking behavior patterns during long flights and before any general conclusions are possible in other races.”
Although she has so far only studied the question in a bird species, Dr. Yorzinski’s findings are similar to those of a human pilot. A small 1996 study showed that pilots blink faster in a simulator, and more often than not, when they were in flight, especially during landing. A 2002 study showed that pilots blink less during visually demanding parts of a flight.
Human pilots aren’t exactly like birds, but Dr. Yorzinski said the parallels are interesting. During the dangerous maneuvers, the tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny Be able to balance, ”he said.
