Outside my home office window is horizontal tree branch, just the right size for a squirrel to hang out on, but it was always just a little too busy, a little too much traffic for them to be comfortable there for too long. And then the coronavirus began.
As the humans isolate, traffic goes down, and the squirrels come out to play. They’re even ready for their closeup. But what’s that in the eye?
It turns out that you can take a selfie reflected in a squirrel’s eye, if you’re OK with it being of your house instead of you.
Squirrels are prey animals, so they have a wide field of view, to see predators on all sides. Their eyes give them a panoramic point of view. So to match that in a camera, I took a panorama of my house from directly underneath the squirrel’s branch, maybe 10 feet below it. (A regular shot would never have fit the whole house.) Then I reflect it left to right, because the images in the eyes are literally mirror images of the house.
I wondered just what the squirrels could see of this and it turns out that the squirrels active in the trees in the daytime, like these guys, have very acute vision, including color vision: it is their primary mode of sensing danger. But they don’t seem to see me through the window.
Thanks David Somerville for the great squirrel (etc.) blog!