Vladimir Dinets is an American zoologist of Russian origin who teaches at the University of Tennessee but has a house in West Orange, New Jersey. Why are we interested in your address? Because it is just outside his home that Dinets was able to observe an exceptional example of Adaptation to the urban environment by an animal: a sparviere of Cooper, a small bird of bitch spread throughout the North and Central America. In a study published on Frontiers in Ethologythe zoologist tells his observations on the hunting system invented by the sparvierewhich depends directly on … a traffic light.
Observations in the courtyard. These observations are added to the long list of studies that tell how animals, especially birds, have learned to adapt to the urban environment: they are very numerous, for example, the stories of Gazze and crows that use the busy roads to get open walnuts and oysters from the machines that pass. Cooper’s sparviere studied by Dinets, however, has invented an even more complex system.
The zoologist tells that near his house there is an intersection of traffic lights from which he passes every day; It is an intersection not particularly frequented, explains Dinets, but Equipped with one of those buttons that pedestrians press to lengthen the duration of the greenery and cross safely. When a pedestrian presses the button, an acoustic signal starts, and in those cases, Dinets tells, the traffic lights are formed long enough to reach a small tree with a very thick hair that is located at the bottom of the street.
Easy prey. Well, precisely in the hair of that tree he lived the cooper sparviere studied by Dinets. Which normally was calm on his branch, but when he felt the acoustic signal he was headed, waiting for the tail of machines to arrive under his house. At that point he left the open, using cars as a coverage, and aimed at the courtyard of a specific house. This, Dinets still tells, was inhabited by a large family that he often ate in the courtyard and left his leftovers at the disposal of sparrows, doves, starvations and other local birds – the favorite prey of the sparviere.
The traffic light. The courtyard was therefore a real bud for the bird designed by Dinets, who had learned to exploit the tail that formed at the traffic light for approach undisturbed, and to surprise his future prey by surprise. The zoologist also tells that, last summer, the “family he ate in the courtyard” moved, and at the same time the acoustic signal of the traffic light broke (and the city of West Orange has not yet repaired it).
Since then Dinets no longer sees Cooper’s sparviere, who probably found another most comfortable traffic light to exploit.
