Why researchers gave pigeons tiny backpacks
You might assume that pigeons keep their eyes still as they fly. New research, however, shows that pigeons engage in slow, subtle eye movements. This behavior might help the birds collect additional information regarding their environment.
The researchers made the discovery by outfitting over a dozen pigeons with little cameras and backpacks. That’s no joke—the camera sat 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 tiny computer. All in all, the whole thing weighed 27 grams.
The assumption for birds with lateral-facing eyes was that they don’t move their eyes while in flight to avoid those movements getting in the way of the visual motion of flying.
“Instead, we found really subtle, slow drifting eye movements as pigeons fly forward,” Anthony Lapsansky, an organismal biologist at Northwest Indian College and co-lead author of the Current Biology study, said in a University of British Columbia Q&A. “Rather than locking their eyes in place, they compensate for that visual motion with eye movements—potentially to resolve finer details or see features of their surroundings that can aid navigation.”
The team also discovered that the birds look inward while landing on a perch, which might allow for stereopsis. Stereopsis consists of gauging depth by juxtaposing each eye’s perspective, and was previously recorded in just some birds of prey.
The pigeon eye movement revealed in the study puts them a step above their robotic counterparts. Plenty of drones feature rigid cameras. They capture visual motion in flight that informs the drone of its speed, direction, and if it’s on a collision course. Birds do this and more, collecting additional information from their surroundings by shifting their cameras—aka their eyes.
“Like birds, humans are highly visual, and this research tells us about basic strategies for extracting visual information for movement that birds and humans have in common,” Lapsansky explained. “We could potentially use these strategies to make autonomous flying robots or drones more animal-like: more skilled at navigating complex environments and closer to truly autonomous flight.”
Pigeon wearing a helmet camera begins its flight
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