There will be times I’m on normal roads or even driving fast on a highway and have had very close encounters with birds flying aross the front of my car.
I never see dead birds on the road so I just assume they have some kind of special airflow mechanism that allowed them to avoid accidents.
In: 111
Birds don’t have a special airflow mechanism, and they don’t always avoid cars, but they do have several advantages helping them succeed where many other animals don’t fare well against cars.
Thanks to divebombing predatory birds, striking snakes, flight formations requiring tight maneuvers, having to hunt quick flying insects, a lot of bird species are very well evolved to have fast reaction times and to calculate the trajectory of fast moving objects really quickly.
Their brains can be so quick processing visual information that it’s likely that a 24 frame per second film that we perceive as continuous motion would be experienced by a pigeon more like a slideshow.
So from the birds perspective, one with much faster reactions and visual processing power, the close calls aren’t nearly as close as they appear to us.
Latest Answers