Scientifically proved that birds’ vision is so much different than ours. Birds see the world in a different way thanks to UV vision. Back in 2007, scientists used a spectrophotometer to analyze the colors of 166 North American songbird species which did not have an apparent physical difference between the sexes.

Humans are trichromats and can only see three colors: blue, green, and red

Birds are tetrachromats, they see four colors: UV, blue, green, and red

From a human’s perspective, in 92 percent of species, both males and females look identical. However, the study showed that these birds have colors that are simply undetectable by our eye and that they use those colors to differentiate their genders by. As it turned out, birds are tetrachromats, they see four colors: UV, blue, green, and red, whereas humans are trichromats and can only see three colors: blue, green, and red.

(Bear in mind, that the magenta UV ‘color’ shown here has been chosen to make it visible for us humans, it is a ‘false color’, as per definition UV light has no color.)

In another experiment, scientists placed stuffed male and female Chats in the wild to see how the living birds would react to them. The wild Chats attacked the stuffed male and tried winning over the stuffed female, meaning the birds were actually seeing something the scientists didn’t.