What does it mean when wildlife biologists say that “an eagle can see a rabbit in a field from miles away”? Does this imply that their vision is automatically more zoomed in? Do they have better than 20/20 vision, or is their vision simply clearer?
In: Biology
When elder gamers were young, video games came in resolutions like “480×240”. They played on monitors that were only a few hundred pixels wide, so a game character’s “head” was a tan square. A game screen today has easily some 4,000 pixels across, and can draw a game character’s head with enough pixels that the eyes and hairline are still visible when the head is across a sizable room. An eagle’s vision is so sharp, it’s like them playing on a monitor with 20,000 pixels, so that a mouse in a field 100 yds away is still drawn clearly enough to see its eyes, ears, and which direction it’s facing if you zoom in on it with a microscope. And an eagle’s eyes have the zoom feature built in. Things you and I see as a dot, they see as a face with a nose and whiskers. It’d be easier to explain if you wore eyeglasses. Humans need eyeglasses to read. Eagles don’t need glasses, but they also don’t need binoculars to read a 100 yds away.
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