Swainson's Thrush
29 May
Very Clever Hawk …
A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds - Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey
The bird seemed to understand that, whenever a human pushed the pedestrian crossing signal, a long line of cars would back up down the street. The savvy creature then used the vehicles as cover to launch a sneak attack on a group of unsuspecting birds gathered in a nearby home’s front yard. Dinets details the hawk’s clever behavior in a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.
The original paper is here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ethology/articles/10.3389/fetho.2025.1539103/full
Very nice pic of the Swainson's Thrush. Thanks for the information about the Cooper's Hawk using the sound of the pedestrian crossing signal and line of cueing cars to provide cover for his attack. This is quite eye opening to the bird's ability to plan it's next meal. It seems we have more intelligent 'eye's in the sky' than we might imagine!
Fascinating. Thanks, too, for including citation : I will certainly follow-up on it at my earliest opportunity.