A Clever Hunter: How a Cooper’s Hawk Outsmarted City Traffic

When Vladimir Dinets first saw a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk in November 2021, he was taking his daughter to school.

In West Orange, New Jersey, the bird—a juvenile Cooper’s hawk, specifically—was not utilizing the crosswalk in the sense of walking across the painted white stripes to get to the opposite side of the street. However, it was ambushing prey by using the crosswalk—more precisely, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk.

Dinets, a zoologist now at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me that the hawk had realized the crossing signal, a loud, rhythmic click that could be heard from at least half a block away, was more of a pre-attack cue. Approximately ten cars would typically be backed up down a side street on weekday mornings when pedestrians would activate the signal during rush hour. This jam proved to be the ideal cover for a covert attack: After the cars had gathered, the bird would leap down from its treetop perch, fly low to the ground along the line of cars, and then suddenly turn into a residential yard, where a small flock of starlings, sparrows, and doves would frequently congregate to eat crumbs—blissfully oblivious to their imminent destruction.

According to Dinets, the hawk had devised a plan: To execute the attacks, the bird needed to mentally map the neighborhood and, perhaps more crucially, realize that the steady ticktock of the crossing signal would cause a traffic jam long enough for the hawk to launch its attacks. To put it another way, the hawk seems to have figured out how to read a traffic signal and exploit it in its pursuit of prey—which is, with all due respect, superior to the way that most people use a pedestrian crosswalk.

According to Janet Ng, a senior wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, Cooper’s hawks are renowned for their swift sneak attacks in the wild. They will hide from prey until the final seconds of a prearranged ambush by zipping alongside bushes and branches for cover. In that sense, Ng remarked, “They’re really fantastic hunters.” These abilities seem to transfer rather easily to urban settings, where Cooper’s hawks fly among trees and concrete, pursuing city pigeons and doves.

According to Dinets, who published his observations of this particular Cooper’s hawk in Frontiers in Ethology, the bird appears to have been greatly influenced by that kind of urban buffet. One of the (human) families in the neighborhood frequently ate dinner outside in the evening, leaving food scraps on their front lawn that would often draw a flock of small birds the following morning. To successfully dive-bomb that flock, however, the hawk required ideal circumstances: sufficient cover from a long enough line of cars to launch an invisible attack. Only on weekday mornings, when foot and vehicle traffic were sufficiently dense that the crosswalk signal would halt traffic down the streets, would that situation come to pass.

Dinets observed over a period of months that the bird appeared to have mastered this intricate system of ifs, ands, or buts. Only when the required level of congestion was achievable did the hawk emerge. Additionally, it would only prepare for an attack by perching in a nearby tree to await the backlog of cars that it knew would soon appear after the pedestrian-crossing signal was activated. The bird would then approach its prey only when the line was long enough to completely hide its course.

This strategy appears to have relied heavily on the crosswalk signal, which allowed the hawk to predict with astonishing accuracy how well cloaked it would be and, consequently, how successful its attack would be. “The hawk understood the connection,” Dinets told me. Beyond Dinets’s observation of this one bird, it’s difficult to demonstrate without experimentation. However, multiple researchers told me that it is definitely possible that this hawk understood the chain reaction that this signal could start in the early hours of a weekday.

Many animals, including various kinds of birds, have shown themselves to be astute in human settings. For example, pigeons wait for people to turn on drinking fountains before taking a sip of the water. Farmers and ranchers in Saskatchewan and Alberta have told Ng that they have witnessed hawks use gunshot noises during gopher hunts as a signal that a feast is about to be consumed. Additionally, crows have been observed dumping hard-shelled nuts into roadways for automobiles to crack open.

Even if no other bird ever does it, this hawk’s accomplishment is remarkable, according to Ng, who was not involved in the observations. In a human system that was several steps away from its target, the hawk deduced a human signal. It took a certain amount of foresight, a mental map of the neighborhood, and even an awareness of the human week’s rhythm to manage these attacks—for example, knowing the difference between weekend lulls and weekday rush hours.

Additionally, the bird seems to have realized all of this rather quickly: a lot of Cooper’s hawks that are seen in urban areas only spend the winter there, suggesting that this one may have conceived its attack strategy as a newcomer to the area. According to Joshua Plotnik, a comparative-cognition specialist at Hunter College, a creature is generally more likely to be cognitively proficient the faster it picks up new information. Ng noted that this hawk accomplished all of that while still a juvenile, still in the first few years of life, when the majority of Cooper’s hawks “are just not good at hunting yet.” “Starvation is a common cause of mortality at this age,” she said.

The fact that this hawk used a crosswalk signal at all—an environmental cue that is typically completely ineffective for birds and possibly a nuisance—may be the most charming aspect of its story. It is both unsettling and humbling to witness any animal blur the boundaries between what we perceive to be the human and non-human realms. According to Plotnik, most other creatures are just more adaptable than we would ever imagine.

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