I 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.
throwanem · 11h ago
I see pigeons and sparrows dodge cars by inches, too. For that matter I do the same myself! Sparrows hawk insects out of the air, and I believe starlings also. Predicting motion would need to be second nature, I think. Like skillfully catching a ball, but much more so and between your teeth...
xg15 · 2h ago
At the main bus port of my city, you can see heaps and heaps of pigeons casually strolling right in front and even below the buses while they are still driving. There definitely has to be learned behavior for the pigeons to be so completely devoid of fear in that situation.
vikingerik · 10h ago
Well, there is survivor bias there, of course; you don't see the ones that didn't learn to dodge...
PunchyHamster · 3h ago
You do, you can usually find those on your passenger seat
stanmancan · 10h ago
We call that evolution
hnlmorg · 9h ago
Nit pick, but it’s natural selection
The cars aren’t evolving the birds, but they are selecting the fittest.
throwanem · 10h ago
Correct. They would be visibly laminated to the pavement or smashed in the gutter. It does happen, but less often than ospreys drop fish in late summer.
im3w1l · 10h ago
But it makes you wonder why they cut it that close. What benefit they get from it. I can think of several plausible reasons but none that is self-evidently true.
throwanem · 10h ago
Why waste energy giving someone else a free shot at whatever you're finding it worth your time to stand in the street over? It isn't that someone else wants that dropped french fry or whatever. It's that everyone else does.
harrall · 4h ago
Not a bird but as a human, it’s fun.
Adrenaline is hell of a drug… and the best one.
quinnirill · 7h ago
This is quite common prey animal behavior. Larger predators have a harder time adapting to rapid turns made just as the jaws/claws are about to snap shut.
fullstop · 10h ago
Perhaps for the same reason that people skydive or engage in other risky behavior.
blarg1 · 10h ago
I once threw a tennis ball straight up, just as a bird happened to be flying past, it rolled right and dodged it by a cm.
throwanem · 10h ago
I don't really know what it's like to be a bird, of course, but I have to imagine their subjective experience of duration differs greatly from ours.
dmd · 9h ago
Search for "flicker fusion rate" to learn a lot more about this.
rzzzt · 6h ago
Mine is 42 Hz according to a recent examination. Are high refresh rate monitors are wasted on this pair of eyes?
throwanem · 6h ago
I don't know. Have you tried one? That's neither the rhetorical nor the dismissive response it may seem...
rzzzt · 5h ago
The mouse is very snappy compared to a 60 Hz display.
umbra07 · 4h ago
Just do a basic double blind test. get someone else to switch the hz a couple of times for you, and see if you can tell the difference. i would be surprised if you got anything less than a 100% success rate.
toss1 · 4h ago
Our flicker fusion rate is different for the fovea and nearby central vision vs the peripheral vision.
The central vision is slower-response, higher-resolution, and of course color vision.
The peripheral vision is monochrome and has a much faster flicker-fusion, tuned to picking up motion in the periphery.
So, the same flicker rate that you never notice on a small monitor may flicker annoyingly on a large monitor. To check that a setup will not flicker for you, set it up in a darkish room, focus around 70°-100° to one side of the monitor so it is in your peripheral vision, and both look at one place and notice your periphery, and also move your focus quickly from one place to another and notice if the screen blurs like bright stationary objects or looks like a discontinuous blur (really easy to get that effect with fluorescent lights). Do it both left & right and towards the ceiling. If flicker shows up in these tests, it will still eventually bug you when looking directly at the screen, even if it isn't as noticeable because your focus is in the center of your vision.
throwanem · 8h ago
That talks about the mechanics of visual perception. I'm discussing qualia, which I am far more confident crows share with me than does the particular subtype of Hacker News commenter who will with tiresome predictability and total lack of novelty turn up to press the footless insistence that crows could never.
HeyLaughingBoy · 6h ago
Squirrels, OTOH...
Neywiny · 12h ago
I'm not an ornithologist but I think birds integrate some onboard magnetic compass sensors. So, it would be interesting if they can pick up the magnetic part of an electromagnetic wave of the radio. Seems very low likelihood but would be cool.
"Picking up" and "discerning useful data" are very different.
I'm not even talking about "deciphering". Even knowing that energy in a certain bandwidth means planes about to leave seems a large jump - and a radio tuned to a station is likely an order of magnitude more stringent than an animal's sensory abilities.
PunchyHamster · 3h ago
I'd imagine the fact they are high frequency rather than constant field would make it impossible
xg15 · 3h ago
I read somewhere that migrating birds often use human infrastructure - roads, railways, power lines, etc - as landmarks or even "route markers" for their migrations.
A bit of a shower thought, but I think you can probably generalize that idea: Most birds spend a significant part of their life in the air, looking down onto human-designed landscapes. The aerial view of our cities is probably as familiar to them as our neighborhood streets are to us.
But unlike Google Maps, they see the city moving - all the cars, pedestrians, trams, railways, etc. It seems likely to me that if this is what you see day-in, day-out, because it is literally the space you are living in, you will pick up some general patterns in what you see and might even start to experiment how those patterns can be exploited.
nomand · 1h ago
a bird's eye view :)
lloeki · 12h ago
> Cooper’s hawk is on a rather short list of bird of prey species that have successfully adapted to life in cities. A city is a difficult and very dangerous habitat for any bird, but particularly for a large raptor specializing in live prey: you have to avoid windows, cars, utility wires, and countless other dangers while catching something to eat every day.
Peregrine falcons adapted quite well, and they're much more sizeable. That said, their size make them very apt to hunt pigeons, so this could be a less risky niche to hunt for; I mean, pigeons usually fly higher up than sparrows.
twic · 7h ago
The Black Redstart evolved to live in holes in cliffs and the like, and never used to be widespread in the UK. After the second world war, cities all over the south were bombed out, and they moved into the deserted, derelict bombed areas in great numbers. As the bomb sites were cleared and the cities redeveloped, their habitat was eroded. But at the same time, Britain was de-industrialising, and they moved into the abandoned factories in the North. As those now get redeveloped, they are losing their habitat again.
hshdhdhj4444 · 11h ago
You have the story of Flacco the owl who lasted 1 year in Manhattan after having spent his entire life in captivity.
Even his death (due to a collision with a building) was likely less because of his ability to survive, since he managed to learn all the skills necessary, and more due to the fact that his primary food source, rats in and around the city, were laden with rat poison.
We have consistently and regularly underestimated non human animals cognitive abilities which is frankly strange if you understand evolution since it would be strange for only humans to have a certain evolutionary feature such as intelligence and every other species to not have it at all.
nashashmi · 7h ago
> underestimated non human animals cognitive abilities
I think humans have done precisely what humans do: misunderstand. Unlike other animals, humans don't have the ability to understand creatures they have not studied for long periods of time.
We know animals are intelligent. But we don't know what intelligence means. Is it something we can use? no? then it is something we ignore. And it is most likely something we disrespect.
hackeraccount · 11h ago
There are Peregrine falcons in my city. I remember walking downtown one time and seeing one on the sidewalk with a pigeon in its talons. All the commuters and I just walked around it. Really weird somehow.
vidarh · 10h ago
London apparently has a high density of them (but high density still only means something like 40 breeding pairs), and some people are all excited about the prospect that they can do something about the rapidly rising wild parakeet population...
morkalork · 10h ago
I'm having a hard time squaring away the image of grey gloomy London also being overrun with colourful tropical looking birds, I had to google it and see.
vidarh · 1h ago
Here are some pictures taken out of my home office window too:
They’re surprisingly well adapted to a large range of temperatures because of the species found in temperate rainforests at higher altitudes. They frequently enough escape from pet stores and zoos that there are many sizable populations spread out around the world. The one nearest me is the infamous Pasadena parrots [1] which is made up of thousands of birds likely built up over decades of escapes. There are populations in Chicago, New York, Rome, Tokyo, and plenty of other cities in the world.
The City Hall of San Jose, CA, currently has a couple peregrine falcon young in a nest on its roof i believe. It’s relatively high up for the area.
pdabbadabba · 11h ago
> Peregrine falcons adapted quite well, and they're much more sizeable.
I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I am aware -- and according to every source I've looked at in the last few minutes -- Peregrine falcons and Cooper's hawks are about the same size (length and wingspan are within 1-2 inches).
throwanem · 11h ago
Peregrines are somewhat smaller and much more lightly built. I live in a nesting pair's territory which often sees transitory Cooper's; they're easy to distinguish both in flight and at rest. Male Cooper's are more peregrine-sized and hard to tell from sharp-shinned hawks sometimes, but that is an ordinary enough sexual dimorphism in birds.
Interestingly, while peregrines and accipiters like Cooper's share a habit of taking passerines in flight, the response of potential prey seems to differ. I frequently see songbirds mob a Cooper's; I can't think offhand of a time I've seen them respond to a peregrine other than by crypsis.
lloeki · 10h ago
Sadly we don't have Cooper's around here so I have no experience with them, hence why I looked them up (see nearby comment) and according to that source found out they were on the smaller size and much smaller weight.
Around here the only ones who would dare mob a peregrine would be crows.
throwanem · 10h ago
Sure. I'm just talking about the impression they give in life. But I suppose in that sense the other birds must find a peregrine much more striking, and it very belatedly occurs to me that peregrines no doubt look smaller and more gracile to me for the higher altitudes their stooping hunting habit would require. When I do occasionally see them on approach to their nearby nest, I'm struck by their relative size. So yeah, between that and reviewing my Sibley's the error here is mine, though - for that matter, likely also because - I do find all falcons rather streamlined and compact in impression compared with accipiters or buteos.
lloeki · 11h ago
> according to every source I've looked at in the last few minutes
> Total length of full-grown birds can vary from 35 to 46 cm (14 to 18 in) in males and 42 to 50 cm (17 to 20 in) in females. Wingspan may range from 62 to 99 cm (24 to 39 in), with an average of around 84 cm (33 in)
> In northern Florida, males averaged 288 g (10.2 oz) and females averaged 523 g (1.153 lb). In general, males may weigh anywhere from 215 to 390 g (7.6 to 13.8 oz) and females anywhere from 305.8 to 701 g (0.674 to 1.545 lb), the lightest hawks generally being juveniles recorded from the Goshutes of Nevada, the heaviest known being adults from Wisconsin
(not putting the full regional rundown, just the biggest entry)
skipkey · 11h ago
In my neighborhood in the East Valley in Phoenix, I’ve seen Cooper’s hawks, kestrels, peregrine falcons, zone tailed hawks, merlins, and one immature bald eagle. Along with the numerous turkey vultures and the occasional black vulture.
Etheryte · 12h ago
Plus pigeons are not exactly known for being incredibly smart or agile, so if you're big enough to take one down, you probably won't struggle too much for food.
Modified3019 · 11h ago
Pigeons are actually known for being very agile, and are able to do vertical takeoffs and evasive maneuvers like a backflip loop immediately after takeoff, which is precisely to evade predators like falcons.
City pigeons just tend to become fat, lazy and used to suppressing their flee response around traffic and people.
KineticLensman · 10h ago
Pigeons fly surprisingly fast and can outfly smaller raptors in a straight line. A stooping (diving) Peregrine will usually win. Its strike may decapitate the pigeon which tends to minimise the struggling
morkalork · 10h ago
Except for the part where pigeon racing is an entire sport that relies on both their speed and intelligence
jfk13 · 8h ago
Except that it's not clear whether the intelligence† that underlies their homing ability is equally effective in helping them evade predators.
†Is "intelligence" even the right word here? I don't know. Much depends on how you define it, I guess, combined with the unknowability of the pigeon's own mental processes.
varispeed · 12h ago
The other day when visited local city park (in South London) I spotted a Buzzard just chilling on the tree among pigeons.
Small, but majestic nonetheless.
eorthling · 9h ago
Obligatory note that if you're from the US you are probably picturing a different bird than parent saw.
happyopossum · 9h ago
would you care to expound on that?
sethhochberg · 8h ago
In the US, buzzard is pretty much always slang for a turkey vulture. The common buzzard in Europe/Asia is a different bird entirely.
lloeki · 6h ago
> The common buzzard in Europe/Asia is a different bird entirely
Funnily enough in France:
- buzzard is "buse" (mostly - although not limited to - Buteo[1])
- there's an unrelated yet identically pronounced "busard" (Circus[2]).
- EDIT: oh, and "balbuzard" (Pandion[3] a.k.a ospreys)
I once wrote a personal’s ad in SQL on Craigslist, back when they had that section. A DBA replied and asked if I wanted hawking. She had a Cooper’s hawk. I met her at a commercial park in a Saturday morning. She was driving a Honda CRV, the hawk was in the front passenger seat, and I hopped into the back seat.
She started driving and spotted some crows. The hawk saw them as well. Wearing a “don’t kill me either your claws” glove, she moved her hand to the hawk, who gleefully jumped on. She rolled down her window, stuck the hawk outside, and it was basically a drive by shooting with a bird bullet. This happened three times.
My most vivid memory of this was her ripping the crows apart into pieces and putting the then into a bucket, like it was sushi you’d order from KFC.
speakfreely · 5h ago
I've reread this a few times and I still can't figure out if there's something wrong with me or something wrong with this post.
I once wrote a personal’s ad in SQL on Craigslist, back when they had that section. A DBA replied and asked if I wanted hawking.
I feel I have to reply, but I have no idea what to say.
deadbabe · 3h ago
For starters he could post what the hell his SQL query was.
patrick41638265 · 6h ago
Reading the first paragraph of this made me think how LLMs must feel when someone tries prompt injection on them
dmd · 9h ago
And you didn't get married!?
throwanem · 9h ago
Not OP, but I'm friends with crows. Imagine having to try to explain that...
srean · 8h ago
Very intelligent birds.
IAmBroom · 7h ago
"Baby, those body parts mean nothing to me! I love crows!"
Don't hate the player, baby.
throwanem · 7h ago
They have a much stronger sense of propriety than most humans. So really do most animals other than us and perhaps some close relatives. I'm not actually sure that says anything in our favor.
senkora · 8h ago
I bet she was a very good database administrator.
layer8 · 7h ago
Probably the hawkish type.
3cats-in-a-coat · 7h ago
And this, kids, is a Markov chain.
isatty · 5h ago
Whatever this is, write more.
tsss · 6h ago
That's really horrible. Crows can feel pain too, you know.
qingcharles · 8h ago
This is peak HN.
sodokuwizard · 12h ago
If true, then this hawk has more pattern recognition than many humans I've encountered over the years.
hoseja · 12h ago
If you have nothing else to do and your lunch depends on it, many patterns can be gleaned even by birdbrains.
throwanem · 11h ago
The voice of experience.
johngossman · 11h ago
If you are interested in these birds and live in the Seattle area, the Urban Raptor Conservancy has a wealth of information:
There are over a hundred nesting pairs in Seattle.
munchler · 14h ago
Surely the author teaches at Rutgers University, not “Rudgers”.
c-linkage · 13h ago
It's spelled like it sounds! :D
troelsSteegin · 13h ago
Local to south Jersey it's "ruckers".
cameronh90 · 11h ago
I’m from south Jersey and have never heard of this “ruckers”. Is it near Ouaisné?
hughdbrown · 7h ago
I was about to call fake on this -- Americans from south Jersey are largely unfamiliar with the present perfect and would not say "[I] have never heard of" but "[I] never heard of" instead.
But it turns out this grammatical cue is an effective way to discover that the comment is not about an American south Jersey but a British one.
layer8 · 11h ago
It’s an Albany expression.
louky · 8h ago
>> As of 2025, he also teaches mathematics at Rudgers University.
In the second sentence.
Not even run through an AI grammar-checker?
xandrius · 7h ago
What's wrong with that?
Philpax · 6h ago
I believe it's Rutgers, not Rudgers.
cryptonector · 4h ago
Spelling, not grammar. Perhaps OP meant that the comma is unnecessary?
nosmokewhereiam · 11h ago
Japanese crow-dactles would put candy in wrappers into crosswalks and let cars run over them. They may have used the sounds of the crosswalk. I have no sources, just anecdotal.
They were big birds. Intimidating wingspans, if hit by cars on their highways: they damaged cars, etc.
panny · 13h ago
I'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.
Someone · 12h ago
Some crows in Japan do something like that, dropping nuts on/near a pedestrian crossing, and waiting for a green pedestrian light. See https://youtu.be/BGPGknpq3e0?feature=shared
Neywiny · 12h ago
Looks like Karasu is the Japanese word for crow. So this is an interesting linguistics exchange
msephton · 2h ago
Came here to post that one. I remember watching it so clearly and it's stuck with me.
I once saw racoon prints descend from the rafters in a barn, complete with little muddy handprints on the doorknob into the feedroom, like some sorta sylvan-bandit tom cruise.
When food is on the line, animals can figure all sorts of things out.
hughdbrown · 7h ago
'Racoon', variant of 'raccoon'.
Of course, I prefer the double-c variant because of the orthographic anomaly of the person who tends to the raccoons' area at the zoo, the raccoon-nook-keeper.
pfdietz · 10h ago
Now I just need to learn to tell Coopers from Sharp-shinned. The eternal struggle.
quercusa · 10h ago
If only they'd perch side-by-side!
plank · 9h ago
The point the story tries to make is that the Hawk learned traffic signals. That is not necessarily the case. It could be that the hawk just sees that the cars are blocking the sight of the prey.
Still an intelligent action, only does not mean the hawk understands the signal itself.
hatthew · 8h ago
The suggestion is that the hawk hears the signal and knows that the line of cars is about to be unusually long in a minute, so it prepares by flying into position.
happyopossum · 9h ago
the story as told outlines that the hawk will stage itself when it hears the sound of the crosswalk, in anticipation of the line of traffic getting long enough for it to use as concealment.
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.
The cars aren’t evolving the birds, but they are selecting the fittest.
Adrenaline is hell of a drug… and the best one.
The central vision is slower-response, higher-resolution, and of course color vision.
The peripheral vision is monochrome and has a much faster flicker-fusion, tuned to picking up motion in the periphery.
So, the same flicker rate that you never notice on a small monitor may flicker annoyingly on a large monitor. To check that a setup will not flicker for you, set it up in a darkish room, focus around 70°-100° to one side of the monitor so it is in your peripheral vision, and both look at one place and notice your periphery, and also move your focus quickly from one place to another and notice if the screen blurs like bright stationary objects or looks like a discontinuous blur (really easy to get that effect with fluorescent lights). Do it both left & right and towards the ceiling. If flicker shows up in these tests, it will still eventually bug you when looking directly at the screen, even if it isn't as noticeable because your focus is in the center of your vision.
Edit to add https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230828130356.h... . What frequency were you at? Seems they may actually be listening.
I'm not even talking about "deciphering". Even knowing that energy in a certain bandwidth means planes about to leave seems a large jump - and a radio tuned to a station is likely an order of magnitude more stringent than an animal's sensory abilities.
A bit of a shower thought, but I think you can probably generalize that idea: Most birds spend a significant part of their life in the air, looking down onto human-designed landscapes. The aerial view of our cities is probably as familiar to them as our neighborhood streets are to us.
But unlike Google Maps, they see the city moving - all the cars, pedestrians, trams, railways, etc. It seems likely to me that if this is what you see day-in, day-out, because it is literally the space you are living in, you will pick up some general patterns in what you see and might even start to experiment how those patterns can be exploited.
Peregrine falcons adapted quite well, and they're much more sizeable. That said, their size make them very apt to hunt pigeons, so this could be a less risky niche to hunt for; I mean, pigeons usually fly higher up than sparrows.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaco_(owl)
Even his death (due to a collision with a building) was likely less because of his ability to survive, since he managed to learn all the skills necessary, and more due to the fact that his primary food source, rats in and around the city, were laden with rat poison.
We have consistently and regularly underestimated non human animals cognitive abilities which is frankly strange if you understand evolution since it would be strange for only humans to have a certain evolutionary feature such as intelligence and every other species to not have it at all.
I think humans have done precisely what humans do: misunderstand. Unlike other animals, humans don't have the ability to understand creatures they have not studied for long periods of time.
We know animals are intelligent. But we don't know what intelligence means. Is it something we can use? no? then it is something we ignore. And it is most likely something we disrespect.
https://m.galaxybound.com/@vidar/114256153547342202
And a short walk from mine:
https://m.galaxybound.com/@vidar/114582595390607406
They're everywhere at this point.
[1] https://www.lafieldguide.com/p/the-pasadena-parrots
Quail won't take off if a falcon's shadow passes over them; they'll burst if a hawk's does.
https://albi.fr/environnement/les-faucons-pelerins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albi_Cathedral
I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I am aware -- and according to every source I've looked at in the last few minutes -- Peregrine falcons and Cooper's hawks are about the same size (length and wingspan are within 1-2 inches).
Interestingly, while peregrines and accipiters like Cooper's share a habit of taking passerines in flight, the response of potential prey seems to differ. I frequently see songbirds mob a Cooper's; I can't think offhand of a time I've seen them respond to a peregrine other than by crypsis.
Around here the only ones who would dare mob a peregrine would be crows.
I may be mistaken but that's what I found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine_falcon
> The peregrine falcon has a body length of 34 to 58 cm (13–23 in) and a wingspan from 74 to 120 cm (29–47 in)
> Males weigh 330 to 1,000 g (12–35 oz) and the noticeably larger females weigh 700 to 1,500 g (25–53 oz)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper%27s_hawk
> Total length of full-grown birds can vary from 35 to 46 cm (14 to 18 in) in males and 42 to 50 cm (17 to 20 in) in females. Wingspan may range from 62 to 99 cm (24 to 39 in), with an average of around 84 cm (33 in)
> In northern Florida, males averaged 288 g (10.2 oz) and females averaged 523 g (1.153 lb). In general, males may weigh anywhere from 215 to 390 g (7.6 to 13.8 oz) and females anywhere from 305.8 to 701 g (0.674 to 1.545 lb), the lightest hawks generally being juveniles recorded from the Goshutes of Nevada, the heaviest known being adults from Wisconsin
(not putting the full regional rundown, just the biggest entry)
City pigeons just tend to become fat, lazy and used to suppressing their flee response around traffic and people.
†Is "intelligence" even the right word here? I don't know. Much depends on how you define it, I guess, combined with the unknowability of the pigeon's own mental processes.
Small, but majestic nonetheless.
Funnily enough in France:
- buzzard is "buse" (mostly - although not limited to - Buteo[1])
- there's an unrelated yet identically pronounced "busard" (Circus[2]).
- EDIT: oh, and "balbuzard" (Pandion[3] a.k.a ospreys)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buteo
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_(bird)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandion_(bird)
She started driving and spotted some crows. The hawk saw them as well. Wearing a “don’t kill me either your claws” glove, she moved her hand to the hawk, who gleefully jumped on. She rolled down her window, stuck the hawk outside, and it was basically a drive by shooting with a bird bullet. This happened three times.
My most vivid memory of this was her ripping the crows apart into pieces and putting the then into a bucket, like it was sushi you’d order from KFC.
I feel I have to reply, but I have no idea what to say.
Don't hate the player, baby.
https://urbanraptor.org/research/seattle-coopers-hawk-projec...
There are over a hundred nesting pairs in Seattle.
But it turns out this grammatical cue is an effective way to discover that the comment is not about an American south Jersey but a British one.
In the second sentence.
Not even run through an AI grammar-checker?
They were big birds. Intimidating wingspans, if hit by cars on their highways: they damaged cars, etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/hawk-new...
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ethology/articles/10.33...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon
When food is on the line, animals can figure all sorts of things out.
Of course, I prefer the double-c variant because of the orthographic anomaly of the person who tends to the raccoons' area at the zoo, the raccoon-nook-keeper.
Still an intelligent action, only does not mean the hawk understands the signal itself.