page_title: Bird vision
section_title: Water birds
hierarchical_section_title: Bird vision / Variations across bird groups / Water birds
caption_attribution_description: English: A crested tern in first year plumage. Thalasseus bergii Syn. Sterna bergii Français&#160;: Sterne huppée (Thalasseus bergii Syn. Sterna bergii) portant son plumage de première année. Português: Uma ave da espécie Thalasseus bergii com a sua plumagem do primeiro ano.
context_page_description: Vision is the most important sense for birds, since good eyesight is essential for safe flight, and this group has a number of adaptations which give visual acuity superior to that of other vertebrate groups; a pigeon has been described as "two eyes with wings". The avian eye resembles that of a reptile, with ciliary muscles that can change the shape of the lens rapidly and to a greater extent than in the mammals. Birds have the largest eyes relative to their size in the animal kingdom, and movement is consequently limited within the eye's bony socket. In addition to the two eyelids usually found in vertebrates, it is protected by a third transparent movable membrane. The eye's internal anatomy is similar to that of other vertebrates, but has a structure, the pecten oculi, unique to birds.
  Some bird groups have specific modifications to their visual system linked to their way of life. Birds of prey have a very high density of receptors and other adaptations that maximise visual acuity. The placement of their eyes gives them good binocular vision enabling accurate judgement of distances.
context_section_description: Seabirds such as terns and gulls that feed at the surface or plunge for food have red oil droplets in the cones of their retinas. This improves contrast and sharpens distance vision, especially in hazy conditions. Birds that have to look through an air/water interface have more deeply coloured carotenoid pigments in the oil droplets than other species.
  This helps them to locate shoals of fish, although it is uncertain whether they are sighting the phytoplankton on which the fish feed, or other feeding birds.
  Birds that fish by stealth from above the water have to correct for refraction particularly when the fish are observed at an angle. Reef herons and little egrets appear to be able to make the corrections needed when capturing fish and are more successful in catching fish when strikes are made at an acute angle and this higher success may be due to the inability of the fish to detect their predators. Other studies indicate that egrets work within a preferred angle of strike and that the probability of misses increase when the angle becomes too far from the vertical leading to an increased difference between the apparent and real depth of prey.
  Birds that pursue fish under water like auks and divers have far fewer red oil droplets, but they have special flexible lenses and use the nictitating membrane as an additional lens. This allows greater optical accommodation for good vision in air and water. Cormorants have a greater range of visual accommodation, at 50 dioptres, than any other bird, but the kingfishers are considered to have the best all-round (air and water) vision.
  Tubenosed seabirds, which come ashore only to breed and spend most of their life wandering close to the surface of the oceans, have a long narrow area of visual sensitivity on the retina This region, the area giganto cellularis, has been found in the Manx shearwater, Kerguelen petrel, great shearwater, broad-billed prion and common diving-petrel. It is characterised by the presence of ganglion cells which are regularly arrayed and larger than those found in the rest of the retina, and morphologically appear similar to the cells of the retina in cats. The location and cellular morphology of this novel area suggests a function in the detection of items in a small binocular field projecting below and around the bill. It is not concerned primarily with high spatial resolution, but may assist in the detection of prey near the sea surface as a bird flies low over it.
  The Manx shearwater, like many other seabirds, visits its breeding colonies at night to reduce the chances of attack by aerial predators. Two aspects of its optical structure suggest that the eye of this species is adapted to vision at night. In the shearwater's eyes the lens does most of the bending of light necessary to produce a focused image on the retina. The cornea, the outer covering of the eye, is relative flat and so of low refractive power. In a diurnal bird like the pigeon, the reverse is true; the cornea is highly curved and is the principal refractive component. The ratio of refraction by the lens to that by the cornea is 1.6 for the shearwater and 0.4 for the pigeon; the figure for the shearwater is consistent with that for a range of nocturnal birds and mammals.
  The shorter focal length of shearwater eyes give them a smaller, but brighter, image than is the case for pigeons, so the latter has sharper daytime vision. Although the Manx shearwater has adaptations for night vision, the effect is small, and it is likely that these birds also use smell and hearing to locate their nests.
  It used to be thought that penguins were far-sighted on land. Although the cornea is flat and adapted to swimming underwater, the lens is very strong and can compensate for the reduced corneal focusing when out of water. Almost the opposite solution is used by the hooded merganser which can bulge part of the lens through the iris when submerged.
caption: Terns have coloured oil droplets in the cones of the eye to improve distance vision
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