Slow Motion Raptor Strikes - Smarter Every Day 38

Raptor training? That sounds interesting.

Hey, it's me Destin. I'm at Auburn University today at the Southeastern Raptor Centre with Andrew, and Andrew's a pretty unique guy. What do you do, Andrew?

-I get to work with birds every day. Every single day.

So today we have a red-tailed hawk, and, what's his name?

-Petey.

Alright, Petey is going to hit a target, and we're gonna capture it in high-speed video, and we're gonna show you how a bird can control his whole wing. It's kind of like, you know, an airplane controls just a control surface, one particular area of the wing. Birds can control the whole wing individually. So each individual feather is moving. So we're gonna try to capture that on high speed. Do you think he'll hit the target?

-Oh yeah. Every time.

Alright, so we're gonna see if we can get the maneuver right when, this is Nadira?

-Yeah.

Right when Nadira tries to stop. Now the interesting thing about these birds is, they're like this huge optical processor, and so, the vision gives so much stimulation that they have to shield them so that they can't see. Am I saying everything correct? Andrew, Sean, everything correct here?

Alright, so what we're gonna do is we have a wide angle lens setup with this high-speed camera. This is a Phantom V10. What we're gonna do is, the bird's gonna fly in here and get this piece of meat, and if you look at the lens, it's got a big, a big bulbous on the outside there. That's a special type of lens so we can get this exact point of impact, so let's see what happens.

-Nadira. hup!

OK, so the bird has to wear a leather hood over her eyes because she's so stimulated visually that she gets irritated if she doesn't. It's like this. You and I are probably trichromats, which means we have cones in our eyes to detect red, green, and blue light. Now when we look at this rainbow cat that my daughter made for me, all the rest of the colors are a combination of these types of light. Birds are not that way. Birds are tetrachromats or even pintachromats, which means they have over two-thirds the amount of color information that they have to process that we don't.

This makes sense because birds are most often the most colorful species on the planet. If you think about it, there might be a UV component of light that they're seeing that we're not. So this cardinal might not be red but might be red and a little more UV or less UV.

There's something else that birds have to deal with, and it's called a high flicker fusion rate. You and I can detect a flickering light up to about 18 hertz, and beyond that, it looks like a smooth image. And that's why 25 or 30 frames per second on video works well for us. But for birds, they have a much higher flicker fusion rate. In fact, if you throw in a UV component of light, their higher flicker fusion rate is about 100 hertz, which is pretty amazing.

So if you think about it, you and I are calibrated so that we can go through a world walking and running. Well, birds are flying; that's why they need the higher flicker fusion rate, because if they're going through the woods, they have to be able to see a branch coming and make an adjustment on the fly.

That makes watching this video much more enjoyable because it's high-speed footage, which means it's simulating a flicker fusion rate much higher than you or I are used to. It's like we're seeing the world through the eyes of the bird.

So if you look here as this bird tries to grab this target and she misses, she sees with her high flicker fusion rate and tries to make an aerodynamic correction on the fly to try to grab the target. And I think that is very cool.

-Nadira. hup.

-Percy!

It feels great to know that we're making people Smarter Every Day.

Alright, so a big thank you to Andrew. Andrew spent a lot of time helping me coordinate this, so

-It was a lot of fun.

Thank you, Destin. Thank you very much, and we hope to see you again do this again.

-Yeah, Raptor Centre hopes to see you guys again.

Appreciate it, man. I'm ready.

• Welcome to the Southeastern Raptor Centre. [laugh] [bird sounds]

-Ten pounds, twelve pounds of air they have to push, so when they flap their wings, it's, well it's cooling.

-So this is what they kill with.

-That is what they kill with. So the hallux is what does the piercing.

-Well all their feet does, but that's the biggest, the biggest and the longest.

[Captions by Andrew Jackson]