How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
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Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#2Surely the author teaches at Rutgers University, not “Rudgers”.
Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#3I'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.
Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#4There's a better writeup of this here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/hawk-new...
Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#5Surely the author teaches at Rutgers University, not “Rudgers”.
It's spelled like it sounds! :D
Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#6I 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.
Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#7There's a better writeup of this here: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/hawk-new...
Or, the original paper:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ethology/articles/10.33...
Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#8Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#9If true, then this hawk has more pattern recognition than many humans I've encountered over the years.
Re: How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully
#10If true, then this hawk has more pattern recognition than many humans I've encountered over the years.
If you have nothing else to do and your lunch depends on it, many patterns can be gleaned even by birdbrains.