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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jane Turner" data-source="post: 1473335" data-attributes="member: 4350">Been looking into eye positioning.  Taking two skulls, drawing a line from the bill tip through the eye (mid line horizontal) then dropping three perpendicular lines (bill tip, distal nostril and mid line of the eye socket.  Then repeating the exercise with a living bird (independently).  Finally I rescaled the pictures to get the nostril and bill tip position aligned and looked for any discrepancy with the eye. Its not a statistically significant sample, but in two different species there was 100% correlation of eye in life to centre of the eye socket.  This does make sense, as eye position is really quite a precise thing in birds (as compared to humans) as anyone who has ever struggled with drawing birds will know and can even be useful in separating otherwise very similar species (eg Pintail and Swinhoe's Snipe).Two further observations.  The Portuguese bird really does have its eye in a weird place for a Nuthatch... literally popping out of its eye sockets, then again Nuthatch seems to have rather large eye sockets so perhaps more room for manoeuvre.  It also shows how close a match the bill shape it.  Perhaps it had a terrible shock just before it died!</blockquote>