Brandon Samuels plans to set up cameras this January in hopes of catching footage of birds crashing into windows across campus. Honestly, he really is a nice guy – it’s for science.
Brandon Samuels plans to set up cameras this January in hopes of catching footage of birds crashing into windows across campus. Honestly, he really is a nice guy – it’s for science.
The Neuroscience PhD student is working on ways to help mitigate the number of birds colliding with large glass structures on campus – and beyond – by better understanding the visual perspective of the birds prior to impact.
“We don’t know what a bird is looking at when it’s flying,” said Samuels, who recently completed his masters at Western. “There is a statistical way of looking at how many birds collide – where and when. But I’m interested from the perspective of morphology. I want to look at it from the bird’s eyes – how they see, how their vision contributes to being able to see or not see an obstacle.
“Bird vision is very different from species to species. You have owls with huge eyes on the front their head and you have little birds with eyes on the sides of their head. You would imagine they see the world quite differently.”
Continue reading at Western University.
Image via Western University.
