A buzzard perches on the high branch of a leafless tree. With its back to me, it looks out on the same scene, but do we see the same thing? I see through the trees to fields chemically enhanced with the vivid greens of new crops. The old landscape under this December sky is a brown study: a mood induced by hedges, ash keys, muddy paths, the woods bare and misty-headed with reddish and purple-brown buds. The subtlety of these colours has a deepening beauty as winter thickens across the land.
This buzzard is a harlequin of browns, greys and whites, and it has been suggested that because of this plumage, colour is relatively unimportant to these predators. I’m always impressed when I see buzzards soaring and they catch the light in the silvery feathers under their wings and their markings glow like bronze and polished wood. But this display is for the benefit of other buzzards, not for me.
Perhaps because I like these colours in the landscape, I think they’re more important to the buzzard; it sees them differently, far more intensely than I do. Its retinas have cones with five pigments (we have three), and this allows it to see far more variation in colour than I can. Without my specs all this would look like muddy Impressionism, so that may be the difference between our colour visions.
The buzzard scans the landscape for traces of movement that betray the presence of rabbits, voles or mice. Its eyes are more forward facing than most birds’ and, like humans, it has binocular vision. But it can also create a telephoto optical system that detects and follows movement that would seem a blur to us.
Although this bird is searching for small mammals and birds, if hungry it may go over to the open fields to walk about picking worms and other invertebrates from the bare earth. For now, the buzzard sits, wings folded on its perch, a beautiful grotesque, watching a world with an intensity of gaze that I can only guess at.
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