Hawk
jgoldman | August 23, 2010Predator-prey interactions are often viewed as evolutionary arms races; while predators improve their hunting behaviors and their ability to sneak up on their prey, the prey improve upon their abilities to detect and escape from their predators. The problem, of course, is that there is a trade-off between maintaining vigilance - the attention necessary to be consistently aware of others in the environment takes quite a bit of physical and mental energy - and doing all the other things that an animal must do, such as finding its own food. As a result of this trade-off, many social species,…
bleimanb | January 10, 2008Yesterday I noticed a group of people standing in a circle on Mission Street in downtown San Francisco. "One of our amusing drunken homeless people must have fallen over," I thought to myself. To my surprise, however, I poked my head through the circle to find a northern goshawk (at least I think that's what it was) tearing a pigeon to shreds in the middle of the sidewalk.
Apparently the hawk had swooped down only seconds before my arrival, snatched the pigeon, and was now totally content to spend the afternoon in the...
...middle of an extraordinarily busy San Francisco sidewalk, directly…