A Birds Eye View - Part 1

To fully understand why concealment is so important to your waterfowl hunting success, here is a birds eye view of what ducks and geese see when you're out in the field.

The following excerpts are taken from the 1996 September/October Ducks Unlimited Magazine article entitled, "What the Duck Saw" and from the 2001 March/April Ducks Unlimited Magazine article entitled, The Great Cover-Up" and "Yes, Ducks Really Can See Things We Can't".

Taken From - "What The Duck Saw"

"It is impossible, with our binocular vision and narrow visual field, to imagine how the world appears to a duck"... - H. Albert Hochbaum

"Unless of course, you can imagine your eyes the size of grapefruits and stuck about where your ears presently reside. This would be a start, but it wouldn't be enough. Even with platter-sized eyes to port and starboard, we humans still couldn't visually experience our surroundings as acutely as can ducks, which, like other birds, have the keenest vision of all vertebrates. Compared to a duck's visual abilities, in fact, we human vertebrates have tunnel vision and a nearsighted, blurred view of the world.

Birds' eyes are similar in construction to ours. They have excellent color vision, and their optic nerves, which carry visual messages to the brain, are similar to our sight-sensory pathways. What a duck or a human "sees", after all, is really a series of continuous images formed in the brain from light exciting photosensitive nerve cells in the eyes. But despite the overall similarities in ducks' and humans' optical equipment, there are also dissimilarities and the images that form in a duck's brain when it views the same scene a human does is something we cannot deduce.

Still, by studying the optical equipment ducks carry, we can make some comparisons and describe how humans might see the world through a ducks' eyes.

Unlike the human eye, which is oval-shaped, like an olive, a duck's eye is flattened, its cross-sectional share lenticular. So, structured, the duck's eye serves like a super wide-angle lens on a camera, capturing a wide field of vision. This eye shape, along with its large size, allows the duck in one glance to see close and distant objects in sharp focus (great depth of field, in photographers' terminology) over a large part of the horizon. Thus, with one eye pointed outward on each side of its head, a duck can survey an extremely wide field of view. The common pigeon, which has similarly shaped and positioned eyes, enjoys a total visual field of about 340 degrees. This means that a duck or pigeon, except for a narrow wedge of blind spot immediately behind its body, can sharply view objects near and far in almost a full circle around and above itself without having to turn its head.

So what advantage does a duck receive from having large, wide-set eyes and largely monocular, instead of largely binocular vision? First, when flying at high altitudes, ducks need little depth perception. When on the ground or paddling on the water, where they are most susceptible to predators, their wide-set eyes and sharp monocular vision allow ducks to better detect predators above and around them.

In other words, a duck's optical equipment and visual abilities are adaptations best suited to serve the bird's lifestyle. And when a fellow duck hunter asks you why ducks have such large eyes, now you can reply, "the better to see you with."