Cracking the colour code

‘It’s fascinating. I did not think that colour vision would be of such significance, rather that birds of prey simply have better visual acuity than humans and that was the reason they detect objects so early and at a great distance. However, colour is of considerable importance,’ says vision expert Almut Kelber: a biologist in the functional zoology department at Lund University in Sweden.

In fact, the dark brown species seems to have a superpower – it has the best colour vision of all animals investigated so far, exceeding even humans. If an object has a different colour from the background, the Harris’s hawk can sense it at twice the distance compared to human vision: a stunning discovery.