Can eagles “zoom in” with their eyes like it’s a camera lens?

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I’ve always wondered whether eagles (and hawks, falcons, really any bird of prey that relies on their vision to hunt) can “zoom in” with their eyes just like it’s a camera lens. Because whenever I watch a nature documentary about eagles, the camera technique they show is that of a camera zoom, zooming in towards the prey hundreds of meters away.

I know that with human eyes, we can’t optically zoom in with our eyes. Sure, our eyes can focus on stuff really close to us, making the background blurry, but it’s not like we can “zoom in” to stuff far in the distance.

So to reiterate, can eagles zoom in to view objects in the distance like their eyes are a camera lens or binoculars with zoom?

In: Biology

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

not in the mechanical sense like a camera zooms, no.

for starters, their eyesight is like 4-8x stronger than humans……so they can see details at distance that humans can’t. on top of that they have better focus and color recognition than us.

Their eyes are also not shaped the same. you know how you can squint to focus in on something a little better? imagine that but with way better eyesight to start with

the camera zooming in in documentaries is to give you an idea of your human eyesight vs. how clear the eagle is seeing the same thing.

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