This is bird note.

Great-tailed grackles are known for their long expressive tales and their wide vocabulary of odd sounds.

But this bird has another special trait.

A researcher named Jessica Yersinski has shown that great-tailed

grackles can look at two different objects at once.

If you've seen a chameleons, two independently

swiveling eyes, you have a sense for how this works. Your Zinsky placed two

screens to the left and right of a grackle, so each screen was visible to only one eye.

Human faces briefly appeared on the screens.

When the face on the left was higher than the one on the right, the grackle pointed one eye up and one eye down, to look at both faces simultaneously.

This is the best example yet of a bird that can look at two objects at once.

In another study, Zebra finches failed to look at two separate targets like the grackles, but other birds may have the ability

too.

It's still unclear how well the Grackles' brains can process two different views, but it's possible that Great Tailed Grackles can have one eye on the

lookout for predators and another eye searching for food. Whatever it looks like,

a Grackles eye view of the world is likely a fuller picture than most of us can see.

For Bird Note, I'm Michael Stein.