What does it mean when scientists say “an eagle can see a rabbit in a field from a mile away”. Is their vision automatically more zoomed in? Do they have better than 20/20 vision? Is their vision just clearer?

Question

What does it mean when scientists say “an eagle can see a rabbit in a field from a mile away”. Is their vision automatically more zoomed in? Do they have better than 20/20 vision? Is their vision just clearer?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Actually, eagles can see rabbits *two* miles away.

Their eyes are about the same size as human eyes, so relative to their size much bigger than ours, but they have better focusing (no near- or farsightedness, constant focusign during movement) and, most importantly, they have about 5x more cells in their retina. You can think of eagles having higher resolution – where you as a human see just HD, they see more than 4K.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_eye