Calling someone a ‘bird brain’ used to be a great insult, but today most people know that birds are actually much smarter than previously believed. They have been shown to be able to understand cause and effect, use tools, and even communicate in ways that are well beyond most other animals.

Vladimir Dinets is a zoologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Psychology Department. He studies animal behavior, and happened to come across a Cooper’s hawk behaving in a way that really caught his eye. So, he observed the hawk over the course of time, and its actions were so impressive that he published a study about it in the journal Frontiers in Ethology. In an editorial that went along with the research, he explained what he observed.

“Many animals have learned to use cars for their own benefit, and birds seem to be particularly good at it.” He gave examples, such as, “crows drop walnuts, clams, even small vertebrates onto busy roads to have them killed and/or crushed by cars. Carrion-eating birds routinely monitor or patrol busy roads to immediately snatch roadkill [and] many American highways are partitioned by families of ravens who watch them from dawn till dusk, waiting for meals from under wheels.”

These are just a few of the many well-known activities that birds engage in so that they can dominate their environment. The Cooper’s hawk in his study took this a step further. Dinets explained:

“I noticed something interesting going on at a street intersection near my home. The intersection wasn’t particularly busy […] but sometimes a pedestrian pressed a button, and that caused the red light to last a lot longer, so the car queue became longer, too, stretching all the way to a small streetside tree with a particularly dense crown. When that happened, the streetlight produced a sound signal, letting blind people know that it was safe to cross.”

He noted that when the signal went off, the hawk would wait for the cars to queue up and then fly down the path of the cars, keeping itself out of sight, until it reached the yard of a house near the street. This house had a family that often ate outside, which left crumbs. Those crumbs attracted smaller birds and other prey animals that the hawk could eat. Catching those animals is hard if they see you coming, so using the line of cars to hide is a genius way to improve your odds of success. Dinets explained:

“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.”

What makes this activity even more impressive is that the hawk was young and likely new to the area. So, in a very short period of time, it was able to identify the traffic patterns that were caused by the crosswalk and come up with a way to exploit it to improve its hunting.

This is a remarkable sign of intelligence that very few animals in the wild display.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?