Looking Two Ways at Once

BirdNote®
Looking Two Ways at Once
Written by Conor Gearin

This is BirdNote.

    [Great-tailed Grackle song]

Great-tailed Grackles are known for their long, expressive tails, and their wide vocabulary of odd sounds.

    [Great-tailed Grackle song]

But this bird has another special trait. A researcher named Jessica Yorzinski has shown that Great-tailed Grackles can look at two different objects at once. If you’ve seen a chameleon’s two independently swiveling eyes, you have a sense for how this works.

    [Great-tailed Grackle call]

Yorzinski placed two screens to the left and right of a grackle so each screen was visible to only one eye. Human faces briefly appeared on the screens. When the face on the left was higher than the one on the right, the grackle pointed one eye up and one eye down to look at both faces simultaneously.

    [Great-tailed Grackle call]

It’s still unclear how well the grackles’ brains can process two different views. But it’s possible that Great-tailed Grackles can have one eye on the lookout for predators and another eye searching for food. Whatever it looks like, a grackle’s-eye view of the world is likely a fuller picture than most of us can see.

    [Great-tailed Grackle call]

For BirdNote, I’m Michael Stein.

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Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Great-tailed Grackle ML 213743 recorded by Bob McGuire, and Great-tailed Grackle ML 169298761 recorded by Nathan Pieplow.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2024 BirdNote      August 2024  Narrator: Michael Stein

ID# GTGR-02-2024-08-05        GTGR-02

Reference: 
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-021-06122-8
PDF: https://yorzinskilab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Yorzinski_2021_Grea…