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One might assume that pigeons keep their eyes still while flying. However, new research shows that pigeons make slow, subtle eye movements. This behavior could help birds gather additional information about their environment.
The researchers made the discovery by equipping more than a dozen pigeons with small cameras and backpacks. That’s no joke: the camera was placed on the bird’s head thanks to a hood, and the backpack carried other equipment, including a motion and orientation measurement unit and even a small computer. In total it weighed 27 grams.
The assumption for birds with side-facing eyes was that they do not move their eyes while flying to prevent those movements from interfering with the visual motion of flight.
“Instead, we found very subtle and slow eye movements as the pigeons fly forward,” said Anthony Lapsansky, an organic biologist at Northwest Indian College and co-senior author of the study. Current biology study, he said in a University of British Columbia question-and-answer session. “Instead of fixating their eyes on one location, they compensate for that visual movement with eye movements, potentially to resolve finer details or see features of their environment that can aid navigation.”
The team also found that birds look inward while landing on a perch, which could allow for stereopsis. Stereopsis involves measuring depth by juxtaposing the perspective of each eye, and was previously recorded only in some birds of prey.
The pigeons’ eye movements revealed in the study put them a step above their robotic counterparts. Many drones have rigid cameras. They capture visual movement in flight that informs the drone of its speed, direction and whether it is on a collision course. Birds do this and more: they gather additional information from their environment by moving their cameras, that is, their eyes.
“Like birds, humans are highly visual, and this research informs us about the basic strategies for extracting visual information for movement that birds and humans have in common,” Lapsansky explained. “We could use these strategies to make autonomous flying robots or drones more like animals: more adept at navigating complex environments and closer to truly autonomous flight.”
Pigeon with camera in its helmet begins its flight
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