May

28

Street smarts: how a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully

But what was really interesting, and took me much longer to figure out, was that the hawk always 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.

Easan Katir predicts:

Next iteration: the hawk will be pressing the pedestrian crossing button!

Michael Brush quips:

Pavlov’s birds.

Henry Gifford writes:

When I was hiking down The Grand Canyon I sat on a rock at the edge of the trail and took out a sandwich and started to eat. A bird came flying from my left side, toward the sandwich in my right hand. I reacted by pulling the sandwich back, to the right side of my head. Another bird came from behind and grabbed it.

Later I heard the birds’ favorite food is tuna fish, which they steal cans of from hikers. They open the can by grabbing it in their beak and flying above the one of the three cabins at the bottom of the canyon where the park rangers live and dropping it on the roof. The rangers have been trained to comply by opening the can and placing it on a convenient rock.

Pamela Van Giessen responds:

Was it a raven? They are particularly smart birds when it comes to getting food out of visitors to the national parks we have visited.

Asindu Drileba writes:

Crows & ravens would make good scientists. Here for example a video of a crow showing that it understands water displacement in different scenarios.

Bo Keely, from the desert:

Yesterday at the meteor crater in Death Valley two crows perched on the rim. They had grown feather sunglasses and asked for food. I went to the car & they followed and I gave them whole wheat bread. Then I got in & drove a couple miles down the road, pulled over to check directions, and they landed outside the driver's door asking for more bread.


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