Motor vehicles are among the top five causes of bird death in the United States, killing about 200 million birds in collisions every year. But a juvenile Cooper's Hawk has turned the tables, developing an ingenious method for using cars and traffic signals to its advantage. The hunting strategy, described in a study in Frontiers in Ethology, required surprisingly complex reasoning.
The hawk would spot prey eating crumbs left by outdoor diners at a home near an intersection in urban New Jersey. When a pedestrian pressed the button to cross the street, an audible signal for deaf and hard-of-hearing pedestrians would sound for forty-five seconds. Upon hearing this sound, the hawk would fly to a tree in front of the house, which blocked the prey's view of the hawk and vice versa.
As cars began stopping behind the crosswalk, the hawk seemed to bide its time. Once the queue got long enough—usually about ten cars—the bird sprang into action, swooping down and flying just a few feet above the sidewalk along the line of vehicles. Then, once it reached a certain house, it would make a hard, 90-degree turn and veer into the yard across the street, where prey birds were feeding on the ground.
This strategy was not observed during normal red light cycles when no one pressed the crossing button, as these were shorter and didn't produce long lines of cars. The hawk had learned that the sound indicated traffic would soon back up, creating cover, and then knew exactly when to turn toward prey it could no longer see. The author of the study notes that "Such level of understanding and use of human traffic patterns by a wild animal has never been reported before." The hawk stopped hunting at this location in 2023 when the audible signal ceased functioning and the homeowners stopped leaving crumbs outside.
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