Urban hawks may use traffic lights to ambush prey, study finds

Yahoo

23-05-2025

A hawk in a New Jersey town has learned to use a neighborhood traffic light to hunt more effectively, a study published Thursday found.
The study in Frontiers of Ethology represents further evidence of how certain bird species have adapted to urban life in surprising ways.
'The behavior described here is an impressive feat of intelligence,' the author wrote, 'going a long way to explain the species' ability to successfully colonize such unusual and dangerous environment as [an] urban landscape.'
Past research has uncovered crows that use cars to process food, carrion-eaters adapted to await fresh roadkill, and jackdaws that pick dead insects from the front panels of cars.
The findings also follow reports of a Houston suburb terrorized by a dive-bombing red-shouldered hawk thought to be protecting her chicks.
The behavior in this study, however, is particularly complex. As lead author Vladimir Dinets of the University of Tennessee described in a Friday editorial, a Coopers' hawk of West Orange, N.J. learned how pedestrian crosswalks backed up cars beside an ideal hunting ground — creating a perfect spot for an ambush.
That intersection had a pedestrian crossing which caused one lane to be open — and the intersecting lane to have a red light — for longer than usual, which was marked for blind pedestrians by a loud tone.
In the paper, Dinets described how, while stuck in traffic, he noticed a young Cooper's hawk drop out of a tree, fly low along the line of backed up cars, and dive on a bird by one of the houses.
That house, he noted, was special: the family that lived there often ate dinner outside, and 'their breadcrumbs and other leftovers attracted a small flock of birds – sparrows, doves, and sometimes starlings. That's what the hawk was after.'
But he noticed something even more interesting: The hawk only '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.' Because Cooper's hawks are migratory, he noted, this meant the juvenile hawk had figured out this hunting hack just a few weeks into its time in the new city, 'and it had already figured out how to use traffic signals and patterns.'
Cities are constantly changing, and the hunting spot didn't last forever: The family moved, taking with them the breadcrumb supply, and around the same time the safe-crossing tone stopped working. 'I haven't seen any Cooper's hawks around here ever since,' Dinets wrote.
But those hawks in particular, he noted, are one of the few species of birds of prey — like skyscraper-roosting peregrine falcons and squirrel-hunting red tailed hawks — that have adapted to live in cities.
'I think my observations show that Cooper's hawks manage to survive and thrive there, at least in part, by being very smart,' he wrote.
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