Post #1890450
2026-05-02 16:39 UTC
Replies (27)
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@milla@mastodon.art 2026-05-02 16:47
@leaverou That's a starling, not a crow, but very cool nonetheless! Magpies also have pretty iridescent green-black feathers, while crows and ravens seem inky black - would love to see a bird's eye version of a raven.
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@catraxx@tech.lgbt 2026-05-02 16:52
@leaverou I think that is a starling, but that makes it no less amazing.
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@ShnoofleBear@curly.cat 2026-05-02 17:34
@leaverou Who keeps putting the UV at the lower, and infrared at the upper part of the spectrum??!
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@alpacamale@social.cologne 2026-05-02 18:15
@leaverou Could you make the colors visible by taking a photo in RAW format and adjusting the color settings? I don't know how camera sensors work, but maybe they're able to capture these colors.
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@petitmote@toot.aquilenet.fr 2026-05-02 18:26
@leaverou I don't think that infography makes any sense. We do have a sensibility to green, but we still see colors from 400nm to 800nm. Also, what species of crow is that? I don't know any with white spots and a yellow beak. Is there any source for that? Edit: definitely, the curves don't mean anything
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@pitch@social.flipdot.org 2026-05-02 18:44
@leaverou Just today morning i layed in the sun with my dog and a flock of starlings started scavaging the park we were in. The sunlight reflected super colorful on them.
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@jamesmarshall@sfba.social 2026-05-02 18:44
@leaverou wait, birds are tetrachromatic? Cool!
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@knowattitude@m.ai6yr.org 2026-05-02 18:50
@leaverou I used to toss peanuts to crows regularly, and they were comfortable approaching me. One day in early winter, an hour or so after sunrise, a crow walked close, in front of me, between me and the sun. I was wearing amber polarized sunglasses, and just for ten seconds or so I saw red and turquoise bars on its wings - one of the most astonishing and beautiful things I remember. I've never been able to duplicate it, and have never found corroborating evidence, but I remember thinking "oh that's how they can tell each other apart"
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@NicelyManifest@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 19:10
@leaverou Evidence, if needed, that we do not see the real world - what we experience is an approximate proxy. Besides - the light rays from an object tend to fan in all directions - we only got a tiny sliver of these rays impinging on our retinas. So we only ever perceive very partially. And only perceive a minuscule fraction of all wavelengths.
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@tanavit@toot.aquilenet.fr 2026-05-02 19:12
Poc @jastrow Les commentaires semblent dubitatifs.
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@bloc@infosec.exchange 2026-05-02 19:18
@leaverou I was in a zoo JUST today, where I read a sign stating that blackbirds only seem black to humans, while actually being colorful in the bird world. This sign made me a bit mad by telling me such a thing without explaining why. Now only a few hours later, I stumble upon this. Fedi is amazing!
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@glowl@chaos.social 2026-05-02 19:32
@leaverou gimme birbs eyes please 🥺
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@essexman@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 19:49
@leaverou starlings are kaleidoscopic
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@MxVerda@lgbtqia.space 2026-05-02 20:58
@leaverou *yells this forever in 'autistic'*
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@nyx@lgbtqia.space 2026-05-02 21:03
@leaverou even the physical definition of a black body emits electromagnetic radiation following Plank's law. The definition of something being "black" is if it looks black to humans because it is a useful definition, but yes, if you start looking in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum you will find all sorts of interesting stuff that humans are blind to. Did you know that phones would be really shiny if you could see radio frequency?
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@oatrapado@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 21:21
@leaverou@front-end.social so now we are birds haha
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@rothko@beige.party 2026-05-02 22:42
@leaverou@front-end.social birds are tetrachromats and can see UV.
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@LiliLopez1@truthsocial.co.in 2026-05-02 23:01
@leaverou@front-end.social Absolutely correct 💯
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@helvick@mastodon.ie 2026-05-02 23:01
@leaverou@front-end.social It’s much easier to see with Starlings but the light has to be right. I have a bunch of shots like this one that shows the iridescent nature of the starlings fairly clearly. Obviously it would be much more dramatic if the camera could detect further into the IR and UV but this is unmodified out of a Nikon D5300 and is how I remember it looked to my eye. I’ve never noticed this with crows or ravens around here but it’s common to see that flash of weird blue and green on magpies.
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@evanwolf@mastodon.social 2026-05-03 01:14
@leaverou@front-end.social I wonder if this applied to dinosaur perception of dinosaur feathers...
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@BlizzardA@mastodon.social 2026-05-03 01:19
@leaverou@front-end.social more of this content pls
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@ollicle@mastodon.social 2026-05-03 03:31
@leaverou@front-end.social @maudenificent@aus.social the other thing that looks more interesting when you assign visible colours to invisible wavelengths – the universe as seen by radio telescopes.
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@xfq@w3c.social 2026-05-03 04:42
@leaverou@front-end.social The same applies to people. Don't deny your richness just because you're not understood for the time being.
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@Bumblefish@mastodon.scot 2026-05-03 05:32
@leaverou@front-end.social Yup. And we explain to ourselves that the females are usually drab brown because we are a ridiculous species of ape who have conditioned ourselves to view female as inferior, but to birds, that drab brown contains multitudes of colors that just confuse our eyes. If anything they are more brilliant.
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@A_denie@toot.io 2026-05-03 06:53
@leaverou@front-end.social if you enjoyed that discovery, I recommend reading Ed Yong's An Immense World
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@FransVeldman@fediverse.thefloatinglab.world 2026-05-03 07:46
An interesting fact: After cataract surgery and the placement of a certain lens which lacks UV blocking, in contrast to my other eye which has normal UV blocking, I have now extended vision in the UV range. I can confirm there is more to see than we would normally see. Oh and do something about those silly “black light” lamps in nightclubs, they are not cozy at all and cause human facial skin to light up in a very ugly way. ;-)
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@GinevraCat@toot.community 2026-05-03 13:03
@leaverou@front-end.social Screw google glass - I want BIRD GLASS!