Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association.

I'm Nate Swick.

One species that birders in the ABA area have been seeing quite a bit more of over the last couple decades is Cooper's Hawk.

What was once a bird of woodlands and parklands is now a common bird of cities and towns having learned to take advantage of the many pigeons, starlings, and sparrows available.

And of course, the opportunity to avoid human persecution, which was for many decades a big problem with Cooper's Hawks.

Some studies show that their numbers, or at least the density of coupes, are actually higher in towns than in what was assumed for years to be their, quote-unquote, natural habitat.

Of course, this shift in habitat preference has had consequences as well, negative ones, like increased car and window strikes and potential for disease, of course positive ones also as the species

takes advantage of uniquely urban hunting opportunities and that is the subject of a recent paper

from the journal frontiers and ethology which depicts an impressive and elaborate behavior adopted

by a hunting cooper's hawk in New Jersey and described by animal behaviorist

Vladimir Dimmits, who first observed it while driving his daughter to school one morning.

In the paper, Dimmits describes how a young Cooper's Hawk used a line of cars waiting at a stoplight

as a screen to attack a group of sparrows, doves, and starlings that would congregate

at a nearby private residence. The bird would fly low, parallel to the cars before hanging

a sharp turn, dashing across the pedestrian crosswalk into the adjacent yard to surprise a group

of birds, which is impressive enough, but there's actually

more to it, because this bird would only attempt this strategy when the line of cars was at a certain

length, and the line of cars would only reach this length in certain circumstances, namely

when a pedestrian crossing the street would press the button at the crosswalk.

And in a lot of modern crosswalks, what this prompts is a loud clicking or a dinging or a bell

sound that essentially lets people with visual impairments know when it's safe to cross.

So in this situation, the bird would hear the clicking of the crosswalk, which was its cue, to wait in a tree down the street until the line of cars reached that tree, at which point the bird could no longer see its target and had to go by memory.

...