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 Cooper's hawks are skilled hunters that feast on small and medium-sized birds. Pixabay Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school one morning when a flash of movement caught his eye. He watched as a young Cooper’s hawk darted out of a tree, soared low to the ground along a line of cars and dove into a nearby front yard. Dinets is a zoologist at the University of Tennessee who specializes in animal behavior and intelligence, so the scene naturally piqued his curiosity. But when he watched the exact same scenario play out a few days later, Dinets realized something scientifically interesting might be going on. He decided to investigate. 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 Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Ethology. “When I figured out what was going on, I was really impressed. I didn’t expect that,” Dinets tells the Guardian’s Nicola Davis. “On the other hand, every time I study some animal species it proves smarter than I expect.” Dinets observed the hawk for 12 total hours over the course of 18 weekday mornings in a neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey, during the winter of 2021 to 2022. He watched as the bird attempted six attacks on the prey flock, but because of where Dinets was positioned, he couldn’t see how many of the hunts were successful. On one occasion, however, he did see the hawk fly away with a sparrow gripped in its talons, and on another, he saw the hawk eating a mourning dove on the ground. After the first two attacks, Dinets gleaned a clear picture of what was happening. First, someone would push the pedestrian crossing signal, which would activate a loud, rhythmic clicking sound designed to let individuals with visual impairments know it was safe to cross the street. The noise also seemed to serve as a cue for the hawk, which would fly into a nearby tree and perch on a low branch. As cars began stopping behind the crosswalk, the hawk seemed to bide its time. Once the queue got long enough—usually about ten cars—the bird sprang into action, swooping down and flying just a few feet above the sidewalk along the line of vehicles. Then, once it reached a certain house, it would make a hard, 90-degree turn and veer into the yard across the street, where prey birds were feeding on the ground. That house, as Dinets learned, was occupied by a family that liked to eat dinner outdoors. The next morning, their leftover crumbs would attract sparrows, doves and starlings—birds that Cooper’s hawks like to hunt and eat. “The hawk understood the connection between the [pedestrian crossing] sound and the eventual car queue length,” Dinets writes in a guest editorial for Frontiers in Ethology. “The bird also had to have a good mental map of the place, because when the car queue reached its tree, the raptor could no longer see the place where its prey was and had to get there by memory.” The bird waited in a tree by house 11 until the line of cars got long enough, then it launched its attack by flying toward house one and cutting across the street to the front yard of house two. Dinets, Vladimir, Frontiers in Ethology, 2025 Dinets was impressed by the bird’s ability to master a human environment for its own benefit. The ambush tactics were even more impressive, given the hawk’s likely unfamiliarity with the neighborhood, he adds. “Cooper’s hawks rarely nest in cities in our area but are common winter visitors,” he writes. “So, the bird I was watching was almost certainly a migrant, having moved to the city just a few weeks earlier. And it had already figured out how to use traffic signals and patterns.” The bird had also learned this behavior at a young age, at a time when other Cooper’s hawks “are just not good at hunting yet,” says Janet Ng, a wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada who was not involved with the research, to the Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu. Though adult Cooper’s hawks are skilled predators, Ng notes that young members of the species sometimes die of starvation if they can’t secure enough food. Other birds have also been observed taking advantage of human environments. Urban crows, for instance, have been spotted dropping nuts into traffic, letting cars do the hard work of cracking open the tough shells so they can reach the tasty morsels inside. Pigeons will sometimes wait for humans to turn on drinking fountains so they can get a sip of water. And Swainson’s hawks have been known to follow behind tractors and other farm equipment to nab insects and rodents that get flushed out. But cities are particularly difficult environments for birds of prey, Dinets notes. They must “avoid windows, cars, utility wire and countless other dangers while catching something to eat every day,” he writes in the editorial. Scientists have more often studied intelligence in other birds, such as parrots and crows, rather than in raptors. But that’s starting to change, as papers like this one start to call more attention to raptor intelligence. “My observations show that Cooper’s hawks manage to survive and thrive there, at least in part, by being very smart,” Dinets writes. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.