Day 12: If you were to say that this Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus) was looking forward to having breakfast at my feeder, you'd be right on two counts. On the first, he failed miserably, since every small bird in the yard quickly flew into the safety of the contorted filbert. On the second, a forty-degree field of binocular vision allowed the hunter to better gauge distance, position and size of the intended prey. Hawks' eyes are set in their heads with a greater forward rotation than that of most songbirds, and their full range of vision may extend up to 280 degrees. Some studies have concluded that accipiters' visual acuity is as much as eight times better than that of a perfectly-sighted human.
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