Overview

• Dr. Vladimir Dinets observed a Cooper’s hawk in West Orange, New Jersey, using pedestrian crossing signals to time its hunting strategy.
• The hawk leveraged car queues at red lights as moving cover to stealthily approach sparrows and doves feeding on breadcrumbs in a nearby yard.
• The bird demonstrated advanced spatial memory, navigating from the signal to a tree and then to the prey site by mental mapping.
• The behavior was first observed in winter 2024–2025 and continued until the pedestrian signal stopped working and the food source disappeared in summer 2025.
• Findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Ethology, highlighting the hawk's cognitive sophistication and adaptability to urban challenges.