Do birds see in color?
Yes. Birds have highly developed vision and can perceive colours. Birds have an elaborate variety of cones cells, with more morphological complexity and diversity than those of mammals. The structure of the bird retina is also more complex than humans’. Multiple foveae and other specialized regions that are suggested by non-uniform distributions of oil droplets (such as the red quadrant of the pigeon’s retina) indicate a degree of complexity that is not present in the human eye and for which our own sensory experience provides little intuitive understanding. Birds may have a generalized system of color vision, but individual species may also have features of their eyes adapted to specific visual tasks or conditions, and attention to this ecological dimension in formulating hypotheses about visual function is likely to be critical.
