What you see there isn’t hair. They’re feathers, so tiny and precise that they look like hand-drawn eyelashes.
The photographer Nicolas Reusens captured this image at a magnification of between 3 and 3.5 times the actual size, and what it shows is the edge of a hummingbird’s eyelid in detail that no human eye can see unaided. Researchers believe these structures serve a very specific purpose: they act as a shield, protecting the bird’s eye from particles in the air as it flies at top speed among flowers and branches.
What’s most striking is how uncommon this is in the animal kingdom. These feather ‘eyelashes’ have only been documented in a fraction of the bird families studied so far, making this hummingbird an evolutionary rarity captured purely by chance in front of a camera.
