The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack
owl writes:
In November of 2021, Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school when he first noticed a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk.
The bird-a young Cooper's hawk, to be exact-wasn't using the crosswalk, in the sense of treading on the painted white stripes to reach the other side of the road in West Orange, New Jersey. But it was using the crosswalk-more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk-to ambush prey.
The crossing signal-a loud, rhythmic click audible from at least half a block away-was more of a pre-attack cue, or so the hawk had realized, Dinets, a zoologist now at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. On weekday mornings, when pedestrians would activate the signal during rush hour, roughly 10 cars would usually be backed up down a side street. This jam turned out to be the perfect cover for a stealth attack: Once the cars had assembled, the bird would swoop down from its perch in a nearby tree, fly low to the ground along the line of vehicles, then veer abruptly into a residential yard, where a small flock of sparrows, doves, and starlings would often gather to eat crumbs-blissfully unaware of their impending doom.
The hawk had masterminded a strategy, Dinets told me: To pull off the attacks, the bird had to create a mental map of the neighborhood-and, maybe even more important, understand that the rhythmic ticktock of the crossing signal would prompt a pileup of cars long enough to facilitate its assaults. The hawk, in other words, appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is, with all due respect, more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk.
Cooper's hawks are known for their speedy sneak attacks in the wild, Janet Ng, a senior wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told me. Zipping alongside bushes and branches for cover, they'll conceal themselves from prey until the very last moment of a planned ambush. "They're really fantastic hunters that way," Ng said. Those skills apparently translate fairly easily into urban environments, where Cooper's hawks flit amid trees and concrete landscapes, stalking city pigeons and doves.
[...] But maybe the most endearing part of this hawk's tale is the idea that it took advantage of a crosswalk signal at all-an environmental cue that, under most circumstances, is totally useless to birds and perhaps a nuisance. To see any animal blur the line between what we consider the human and non-human spheres is eerie, but also humbling: Most other creatures, Plotnik said, are simply more flexible than we'd ever think.
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