Human vision can be odd.
It can be odd how frequently seeing one thing makes a person so used to it that then seeing a different thing is surprising. And it is also odd how then seeing that different thing frequently can then make seeing the first thing a surprise!
I was struck by this on a recent camping trip my family and I took to Death Valley National Park. We stayed for a few days, and decided to have breakfast on one of the mornings at a place called Zabriskie Point. This is an easy spot to get to that offers some very impressive vistas of the desert landscape with beautiful views of amazing rock formations, and of the intricate details of canyons and gullies and washes that have been carved out of the rock by wind and water.
While we enjoyed our morning repast, a Common Raven (Corvus corax) landed nearby. I was immediately struck by how large the birds was and how long and heavy its bill was!
It was really pretty impressive. The bill looked long and strong and curved enough to be counted as a serious piece of hardware! And the head and chest of the bird, with its shaggy feathers at the neck, had obvious mass to it as well.
But why did this strike me so? I have seen many, many ravens in my life. Where I grew up, and at many of the places where I did much of my youth birding, ravens were very common. I saw them on a daily basis, was frequently able to get quite close to them, and so was very used to their size and proportions. So, what was going on this time? Was this raven an especially large individual? No. Was it especially close? Not really. So what was it?
I think it was a matter of exposure.
I think what was going on was that I have not been seeing all that many ravens recently, and so my eyes and brain did not have the familiarity with their shape and proportions that my past, more frequent, exposure had yielded.
American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) are incredibly common in the neighborhood where I live and have lived for the past ten years. They are far and away the most common member of the corvid family that I now see on a daily basis. This has given me a large amount of exposure to the size and proportions of a crow. But my current exposure and familiarity to their smaller, slimmer build and lighter, thinner bill left me open to be surprised by the larger and heavier raven when that bird dropped by to check on our breakfast in Death Valley.
And all of this simply resulted from what I have been looking at recently. Like I said, human vision can be odd.
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