9 Astonishing Things Animals Do That May Freak You Out

If there were stealthy special forces units for birds, Cooper’s hawks would almost certainly have a place in their ranks.

They’re smart, tactical fighters who can adapt to what’s going on around them, such as traffic signals on a busy urban street, to time their strikes on prey.

That’s according to a paper published last month in the journal Frontiers in Ethology by Vladimir Dinets, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee who specializes in animal behavior and intelligence.

Dinets was living in New Jersey and driving his daughter to school when he saw a young Cooper’s hawk swoop down from a tree, soar alongside a line of cars and then dive into a nearby front yard when traffic stopped for a pedestrian crossing.

He saw the behavior repeat over the coming days. The raptor seemed to understand that whenever someone pushed the pedestrian crossing signal, traffic would back up and could be used as camouflage for the sneak attack.

“The observed behavior required having a mental map of the area and understanding the connection between the sound signals and the change in traffic pattern — a remarkable intellectual feat for a young bird that likely had just moved into the city,” Diners wrote, adding, “Such level of understanding and use of human traffic patterns by a wild animal has never been reported before.”

Here are some other interesting things animals do:

Crows Carry Freaky Long Grudges

Researchers have determined crows not only recognize individual human faces and can remember them for years, but may also hold grudges against people who threaten them. They may even telegraph it to other crows.

According to a 2010 paper published in ScienceDirect, researchers wore a mask representing a “dangerous face” as they trapped, banded and then released a dozen or so crows near Seattle.

Before they were trapped, the murder of crows didn’t react to the dangerous face mask. Afterward, they “consistently used harsh vocalizations to scold and mob people of different sizes, ages, genders and walking gaits who wore the dangerous mask, even when they were in crowds,” according to the paper.

Another study conducted on ravens, which are cousins to crows, found they carry grudges, too.

John Marzluff, a professor who has spent his career studying human-crow interaction and who was the lead author of the paper, told The New York Times last year that crows may hold grudges for up to 17 years and create multi-generational grudges.

Gene Carter, a computer specialist in Seattle, told The Times crows stared menacingly through the windows of his home for almost a year after he launched a rake in the air to scare off crows that were encroaching on a robin’s nest in his back yard

“The crows would stare at me in the kitchen,” he said. “If I got up and moved around the house, they would find any place where they could perch and scream at me. If I walked out to my car, they would dive bomb me. They would get within an inch of my head.”

Long known for their cognitive abilities, including tool use, problem-solving and social intelligence, the crows devised a game plan. They figured out which bus he took home from work and set about stalking him.

“They were waiting for me at the bus stop every single day,” Carter told The Times. “My house was three or four blocks away, and they would dive bomb me all the way home.”

Carter moved to another neighborhood.

Lizards Shoot Blood From Their Eyes

Wyoming’s state reptile, the greater short-horned lizard, has a variety of defense strategies, from blending into the background to fleeing in the face of danger. They’re often called “horny toads” because of their short, round bodies look toad-like, and they don’t have long tails like other lizards.

When adult lizards are caught, they puff up with air and drive the spikes covering their skin into the mouth or throat of whatever is trying to eat them. A cornered lizard will also rear its head back and move it from side to side, digging its horns into the soft tissue of a predator’s head and mouth.

That all seems like lizard play compared to the reptile’s ability to forcefully expel a stream of blood from a sinus cavity under its eyes that can travel more than three feet, according to the University of Wyoming. The blood repulses feline and canine predators, giving the lizard a chance to flee.

Male Seahorses Can Get Pregnant

Seahorses are interesting creatures for many reasons, but one of the most fascinating is that male seahorses can get pregnant and bear young, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They, along with their close relatives, sea dragons, are unique in having this characteristic.

The elaborate seahorse courtship dance goes on for hours or days. The female transfers her mature eggs into the male’s brood pouch, where they are fertilized. Her role is over.

He carries the eggs throughout the two- to four-week gestation period until he goes into seahorse labor — strong, rhythmic muscular contractions with the creature injecting as many as 1,000 fully formed baby seahorses into the surrounding water.

The young seahorses are on their own. Only about 0.5 percent will survive to adulthood.

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Clownfish Change Genders

Clownfish and other species living in the coral reef environment have developed a reproductive strategy known as sequential hermaphroditism, where individuals can change their gender at some point in their lives, according to an article published in the journal Nature.

About half of clownfish change their genders when they’re adults to become the dominant female in a group, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which explains:

“Groups of clownfish are led by a female, while the second-in-command fish is a male. When the leader dies, the next-in-line male changes into a female in order to become the leader. The tightly maintained hierarchy helps to avoid conflict and facilitate a healthy life.”

This is fairly common in the sea world, according to WWF, which said about 500 fish species change their sex as adults.

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Barn Owls Get ‘Divorced’

Barn owls, with their sweet heart-shaped faces, are known for being monogamous, with two partners sharing exclusive reproduction activities, including nest-building and parental care, sometimes for a lifetime. But about 25 percent of barn owl couples call it quits, or “divorce,” according to a study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

There are a couple of hypotheses. One is that they split because breeding isn’t going well — for example, only a few eggs or the hatch rate may be low. One of the two may seek a higher-quality partner. But it may be that they’re incompatible.

According to the study of 634 barn owl pairs, 166 pairs stayed together and 51 split. Researchers determined that most pairs tried to make the relationship work, but those who didn’t typically separated after a year. A small percentage remained faithful for a few years, including one couple that stayed together for six years before separating.

Very few barn owls “cheat,” or seek a reproductive partner outside their bond. Getting a divorce is the only way they have to get a new partner. When pairs split, the male typically retains custody of the nest. It’s unclear if the females leave willingly or if they are kicked out.

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Hens Chose Dads For Chicks

Hens play a subtle but powerful role in their fertilization, forcibly ejecting about 80 percent of the sperm roosters deposit in their reproductive tract during copulation, according to researchers from Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

Their study of semi-feral chickens, published in the journal The American Naturalist, found hens jettisoned sperm of less-desirable, low-status roosters.

Evolutionary biologist Tommaso Pizzari and his colleagues determined the sperm ejection is selective, and that hens favor the sperm of dominant roosters over subordinate ones, influencing the makeup of their future chicks.

1-800-BETS-OFF For Pigeons

Researchers have found pigeons exhibit gambling-like behavior, and like humans, will choose a greater risk on a big payoff rather than take a smaller but more certain reward.

University of Kentucky research psychologists found that if given a choice of a light that would deliver three pellets of food every time or one that may or may not pay out with 10 pellets, the pigeons consistently picked the latter 20 percent of the time.

Researchers suggested some pigeons are like problem gamblers who ignore their losses and focus on the risky choice that delivers big wins.

“It’s more efficient not to gamble, and the likelihood of winning is low, but pigeons do it anyway,” principal investigator Thomas Zentall said of the findings in 2010. “And so do people.”

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Parrots Name Their Offspring

Research conducted by ornithologist Karl Berg suggests that green-rumped parrotlets name their infants shortly after they hatch and the baby birds in turn tended to respond to specific peeps from the other birds.

Berg told author Virginia Morrell in her book “Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures” that the parrots can also learn the chirps assigned to family members and use them in “conversation.”

In one of his experiments, Berg swapped out the eggs in different nests to determine if the behavior was learned or genetic. He concluded the chirps are learned and that parrot parents assign them to their offspring, as they would a name.