It appears like nothing too exciting is going on in this short observation but in reality there’s a lot happening inside that brain of this bird perfectly chilling with the self confidence of a top predator. The confidence is well earned: they are the descendants of dinosaurs.
Looking and seeing are two separate actions. In order to “see” a higher order brain function called “attention” is needed. Scientists define the foundation of attention with two concepts called Context Generalization and Position Invariance.
Context Generalization is defined as the ability to distinguish important cues from a background of negligible ones. Hawks like all other predators have a distinct set of prey and enemy learned by experience stored in their memory. Ecologists call these “search images”. Constantly moving branches and flickering shadows of leaves create a dynamic noisy background where prey and enemy can easily hide and go unnoticed. Context generalization enables detection of the search image from this crowded background. Computer scientist try to biomimic this ability by feature extraction algorithms. A perfectly matching search image however could be quite conflicting such as this rather confused hawk.
Position Invariance defines the ability to recognize different views of the same object whether it is near or far or upside down or viewed from a multitude of strange angles. An object can be projected onto the retina in infinitely different ways. Therefore visual systems of most organisms (even the humble fruit fly) must recognize this bewildering diversity of objects to survive. A hawk brain can compute and process visual information collected from their surroundings and extract shapes to recognize prey and distinguish enemies.
Be it a predator or a seed eater bird perception is impressive in so many ways.
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