"We humans are constrained not just by our limited senses but by our perception of time," observes Jennifer Ackerman in
The Bird Way.
"In the bird world, things happen fast, sometimes too fast for us to see. To make this point in talks, Mike Webster of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows a real-time video made by biologist Lainy Day of a male
black manakin displaying in the forests of Guyana. In the film, the male manakin looks like it's simply hopping up and down. Then Webster plays Day's high-speed video, which shows hundreds of frames per second, as the female manakin would see it. Jaws drop, and there's an audible gasp from the audience. Between the little hops, the male completes a full-body, 360-degree flip, a high-speed somersault too quick for us to see." (219) We're so slow...!
(I tried to find Lainy Day's video online, without success, but discover I'm actually OK not seeing it. I don't need to - the manakin's somersaults are not meant for me, anyway. It's more fun to leave these flips imperceptible to me, except as a sense of wonder-filled awareness of a world ever pulsing beyond my ken...!)
