How Birds Sleep

This is a digital illustration/hybrid animation that explores how birds sleep. Birds effectively “turn off” one hemisphere of their brain at a time to sleep, alternating sides to achieve full rest. This is called unihemispheric sleep. Resting this way allows birds to keep an eye open for danger in the literal sense, as the eye connected to the awake hemisphere will stay open and aware (right eye = left hemisphere, vice versa), allowing the bird to quickly react to stimuli. The eye connected to the asleep portion of the brain will remain closed. Additionally, birds can control how asleep a hemisphere is by how much they close the associated eye. The owl was created in Adobe Illustrator, and Animated in Adobe Flash.