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How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- munchler 1y agoSurely the author teaches at Rutgers University, not “Rudgers”.
- c-linkage 1y agoIt's spelled like it sounds! :D
- troelsSteegin 1y agoLocal to south Jersey it's "ruckers".
- cameronh90 1y agoI’m from south Jersey and have never heard of this “ruckers”. Is it near Ouaisné?
- layer8 1y agoIt’s an Albany expression.
- hughdbrown 1y agoI was about to call fake on this -- Americans from south Jersey are largely unfamiliar with the present perfect and would not say "[I] have never heard of" but "[I] never heard of" instead. But it turns out this grammatical cue is an effective way to discover that the comment is not about an American south Jersey but a British one.
- panny 1y agoI've watched karasu carefully wait for a yellow light to drop his walnut in an intersection. The last car passing cracked his nut, then he had time to gather the meat during the light change before other cars came along.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Someone 1y agoSome crows in Japan do something like that, dropping nuts on/near a pedestrian crossing, and waiting for a green pedestrian light. See https://youtu.be/BGPGknpq3e0?feature=shared https://youtu.be/BGPGknpq3e0?feature=shared
- fortran77 1y agoThere's a better writeup of this here: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/hawk-new-jersey-traffic/682913/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/hawk-new...
- bayindirh 1y agoOr, the original paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ethology/articles/10.3389/fetho.2025.1539103/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ethology/articles/10.33...
- krisoft 1y agoI have a similar story. I was taxiing a Cessna 152 at LHBS. It is a big grassy field. On that day there were a large flock of black birds sitting on the grass. I made the usual radio call to announce that I'm leaving the runway and taxiing to the tie-downs when the birds flitted away just between my airplane's nose and my destination. The birds outside of that "road" by roughly a wingspan distance remained on the ground and kept doing whatever they were doing. And the ones who took to the air settled back a short distance away from my future path. Now just to clarify I don't think the birds were listening on my radio call. The way I explained it to myself is that they were observing airplanes coming and going long enough that they learned that if an airplane hesitates at that point the next thing they will do is to turn towards the tie-down area. Or maybe it was just randomness. Or maybe as I was making the radio call I already started turning and they just got scarred away by my engine noise.
- Neywiny 1y agoI'm not an ornithologist but I think birds integrate some onboard magnetic compass sensors. So, it would be interesting if they can pick up the magnetic part of an electromagnetic wave of the radio. Seems very low likelihood but would be cool. Edit to add https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230828130356.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230828130356.h... . What frequency were you at? Seems they may actually be listening.
- IAmBroom 1y ago"Picking up" and "discerning useful data" are very different. I'm not even talking about "deciphering". Even knowing that energy in a certain bandwidth means planes about to leave seems a large jump - and a radio tuned to a station is likely an order of magnitude more stringent than an animal's sensory abilities.
- kqr 1y agoIndeed. Not to mention that the frequency is probably used for many other types of communication than announcing the use of that specific taxiway.
- sodokuwizard 1y agoIf true, then this hawk has more pattern recognition than many humans I've encountered over the years.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lloeki 1y ago> Cooper’s hawk is on a rather short list of bird of prey species that have successfully adapted to life in cities. A city is a difficult and very dangerous habitat for any bird, 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. Peregrine falcons adapted quite well, and they're much more sizeable. That said, their size make them very apt to hunt pigeons, so this could be a less risky niche to hunt for; I mean, pigeons usually fly higher up than sparrows.
- Etheryte 1y agoPlus pigeons are not exactly known for being incredibly smart or agile, so if you're big enough to take one down, you probably won't struggle too much for food.
- morkalork 1y agoExcept for the part where pigeon racing is an entire sport that relies on both their speed and intelligence
- jfk13 1y agoExcept that it's not clear whether the intelligence† that underlies their homing ability is equally effective in helping them evade predators. †Is "intelligence" even the right word here? I don't know. Much depends on how you define it, I guess, combined with the unknowability of the pigeon's own mental processes.
- Modified3019 1y agoPigeons are actually known for being very agile, and are able to do vertical takeoffs and evasive maneuvers like a backflip loop immediately after takeoff, which is precisely to evade predators like falcons. City pigeons just tend to become fat, lazy and used to suppressing their flee response around traffic and people.
- KineticLensman 1y ago
- johngossman 1y agoIf you are interested in these birds and live in the Seattle area, the Urban Raptor Conservancy has a wealth of information: https://urbanraptor.org/research/seattle-coopers-hawk-project/ https://urbanraptor.org/research/seattle-coopers-hawk-projec... There are over a hundred nesting pairs in Seattle.
- nosmokewhereiam 1y agoJapanese crow-dactles would put candy in wrappers into crosswalks and let cars run over them. They may have used the sounds of the crosswalk. I have no sources, just anecdotal. They were big birds. Intimidating wingspans, if hit by cars on their highways: they damaged cars, etc.
- pfdietz 1y agoNow I just need to learn to tell Coopers from Sharp-shinned. The eternal struggle.
- quercusa 1y agoIf only they'd perch side-by-side!
- devoutsalsa 1y agoI once wrote a personal’s ad in SQL on Craigslist, back when they had that section. A DBA replied and asked if I wanted hawking. She had a Cooper’s hawk. I met her at a commercial park in a Saturday morning. She was driving a Honda CRV, the hawk was in the front passenger seat, and I hopped into the back seat. She started driving and spotted some crows. The hawk saw them as well. Wearing a “don’t kill me either your claws” glove, she moved her hand to the hawk, who gleefully jumped on. She rolled down her window, stuck the hawk outside, and it was basically a drive by shooting with a bird bullet. This happened three times. My most vivid memory of this was her ripping the crows apart into pieces and putting the then into a bucket, like it was sushi you’d order from KFC.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dmd 1y agoAnd you didn't get married!?
- throwanem 1y agoNot OP, but I'm friends with crows. Imagine having to try to explain that...
- srean 1y agoVery intelligent birds.
- IAmBroom 1y ago"Baby, those body parts mean nothing to me! I love crows!" Don't hate the player, baby.
- throwanem 1y agoThey have a much stronger sense of propriety than most humans. So really do most animals other than us and perhaps some close relatives. I'm not actually sure that says anything in our favor.
- plank 1y agoThe point the story tries to make is that the Hawk learned traffic signals. That is not necessarily the case. It could be that the hawk just sees that the cars are blocking the sight of the prey. Still an intelligent action, only does not mean the hawk understands the signal itself.
- happyopossum 1y agothe story as told outlines that the hawk will stage itself when it hears the sound of the crosswalk, in anticipation of the line of traffic getting long enough for it to use as concealment.
- hatthew 1y agoThe suggestion is that the hawk hears the signal and knows that the line of cars is about to be unusually long in a minute, so it prepares by flying into position.
- p3rls 1y agoI once saw racoon prints descend from the rafters in a barn, complete with little muddy handprints on the doorknob into the feedroom, like some sorta sylvan-bandit tom cruise. When food is on the line, animals can figure all sorts of things out.
- hughdbrown 1y ago'Racoon', variant of 'raccoon'. Of course, I prefer the double-c variant because of the orthographic anomaly of the person who tends to the raccoons' area at the zoo, the raccoon-nook-keeper.
- AStonesThrow 1y agoCoincidentally, American pedestrians are using HAWK signals to navigate road traffic successfully. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon
- louky 1y ago>> As of 2025, he also teaches mathematics at Rudgers University. In the second sentence. Not even run through an AI grammar-checker?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xandrius 1y agoWhat's wrong with that?
- Philpax 1y agoI believe it's Rutgers, not Rudgers.
- cryptonector 1y agoSpelling, not grammar. Perhaps OP meant that the comma is unnecessary?
- xg15 1y agoI read somewhere that migrating birds often use human infrastructure - roads, railways, power lines, etc - as landmarks or even "route markers" for their migrations. A bit of a shower thought, but I think you can probably generalize that idea: Most birds spend a significant part of their life in the air, looking down onto human-designed landscapes. The aerial view of our cities is probably as familiar to them as our neighborhood streets are to us. But unlike Google Maps, they see the city moving - all the cars, pedestrians, trams, railways, etc. It seems likely to me that if this is what you see day-in, day-out, because it is literally the space you are living in, you will pick up some general patterns in what you see and might even start to experiment how those patterns can be exploited.
- nomand 1y agoa bird's eye view :)
- kqr 1y ago> Most birds spend a significant part of their life in the air, looking down onto human-designed landscapes. The aerial view of our cities is probably as familiar to them as our neighborhood streets are to us. The opening few chapters of Perdido Street Station does a great job of conveying this difference.
- blumil0 1y ago[flagged]
- Elaris 1y agoWhat a clever Cooper's hawk! It is adapting to urban life and has learned to make use of the available conditions to make it easier to find food. Doesn’t this also prove that the environment can change both humans and animals? "Survival of the fittest" is probably what this means.
- MarceliusK 1y agoWow... It's not just that the hawk figured out a clever hunting tactic, it's how it did it: linking an auditory cue (the pedestrian signal) with a future visual scenario (a longer car line) and then using that cover to hunt. That's a level of abstraction and planning you don't usually associate with birds
- graftak 1y agoYou do associate those traits with birds in the raven family. I figure the usual association with birds or perhaps animals in general is still mostly based on ‘humans smart; animals dumb’ instead of actual research.