My daughter was reading educational factoids to me yesterday and one stuck in my head. Apparantly owls are the only birds that can see the color blue.

It got me to thinking. I wonder how the bird-life responds when Superman flies sans cape. This screams vignette to me, but my writing well is dry.


Elisabeth

Uhm, this "fact" is fiction, more likely. Because, let's face it, *all* birds have far better color sight than humans. It is rather well-known that humans possess cells to see three different colors,namely red, green and blue. All other colors are seen as a mix of the three above. (That's why our TV and PC monitors are based on those three colors.)

Most birds, on the other hand, possess four different cone cells for color sight, one each for red, green, blue and UV. Additionally, birds have the benefit that they have droplets of oil in their cone cells (responsible for seeing color) that filter the light, enhancing the birds' ability to discern between small nuances of color.

(Although it is very likely that nocturnal birds like owls don't possess all four kinds of cone cells. Pigeons, on the other hand, are believed to be pentachromates, using five different kinds of cone cells for discerning colors.)

How annoying! Most of the time I check for references before passing info along, but since this came from such a reputable site I didn't bother to doublecheck.

This is probably like that scandal awhile back where so many big-named newspapers were caught getting their info from wikipedia rather than looking it up. Some educational exec probably got an e-mail chain somewhere and posted it as a fact, and now I'm the one with egg on my face.

Thanks for pointing that out. I'd rather someone politely state the truth than look idiotic because nobody told me.


Elisabeth

Don't feel too bad, Elisabeth. Don't they say that fully 90% of all 'facts' on the internet are complete nonsense? Or something like that. That fact is probably wrong. We're all bound to get caught out now and then at that rate!

Maybe someone could write a story about an owl who is firmly convinced that only he can see Superman flitting around and the other birds are too kind to disabuse him of the notion.

LabRat

Um, if a bird wouldn't see for instance blue and Superman is just wearing his blue suit sans cape, the bird would see a white *) suit. It's the same as if a surface would only reflects UV-light, for instance. The object does not become invisible **)

Michael

*) IIRC, but could be black if I got it exactly the other way around.
**) Unless it's in the Superman universe, where such a suit would in fact make you invisible until sprinkled with phosphor.

True, an object within a color range we cannot see would not be invisible. Instead, it would seem black to us (because what we perceive as black is the lack of visible light).

Oh, is that where the black NK suit comes from?

Well, it might be brigthly colored in infrared or ultraviolet, but we poor humans cannot "receive" these colors. Although people with an artificial lens are said to be able to see parts of both, but only that which is close to the "normal" range of human vision.

Quite a few flowers to us look like a single color but to bees who see UV they have a pattern, often a bullseye that attracts them to the center.

Quite often, flowers also have stripes showing the way to the center.

That's because, unlike Clark, the bees need someone to draw them a diagram.