Clever Hawk Uses Crosswalk Signal to Nab Prey

Zoologist Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school one morning in West Orange, New Jersey when he saw a curious thing. A young Cooper’s hawk darted out of a tree, glided low to the ground along the line of cars waiting at a traffic light, then launched an attack on unsuspecting prey in a nearby front yard.

A few days later he witnessed the same thing, same yard. Dinets learned that the Hawk was targeting a house whose owners like to eat dinner in the front yard, leaving breadcrumbs and other leftovers on their lawn that attracted small birds – sparrows, doves, and starlings. Which is to say hawk food.

Dinets set up a formal study, observing the hawk for 12 hours over 18 weekday mornings during the winter of 2022. He watched the young raptor launch six attacks on the same front yard, coming away with a sparrow on one sortie, a mourning dove on another.

“But what was really interesting,” Dinets writes in Frontiers in Ethology, “was that the hawk always attacked when the car queue was long enough to provide cover all the way to the small tree, and that only happened after someone had pressed the pedestrian crossing button. As soon as the sound signal was activated, the raptor would fly from somewhere into the small tree, wait for the cars to line up, and then strike.”

The following winter the same hawk returned to the buffet, but eventually the sound signal at the streetlight stopped working and the family leaving crumbs in the yard moved out. Dinets hasn’t seen another Cooper’s hawk in the area ever since.

“A city is a difficult and very dangerous habitat for any bird,” writes Dinets, “but particularly for a large raptor specializing in live prey: you have to avoid windows, cars, utility wires, and countless other dangers while catching something to eat every day. I think my observations show that Cooper’s hawks manage to survive and thrive there, at least in part, by being very smart.”

Photo credit: Vladimir Dinets / Frontiers in Ethology