I used to think hawks were solitary hunters, the kind of apex predators that didn’t need anyone’s help. Turns out I was completely wrong.
Harris hawks—those rust-and-chestnut raptors you’ll find scattered across the American Southwest and down into South America—hunt in packs. Not just loose groups, either. We’re talking coordinated ambushes that would make a military tactician jealous. A team of researchers in Arizona spent roughly three years, give or take, tracking these birds with cameras and GPS tags, and what they found was honestly kind of unsettling. The hawks don’t just chase rabbits together. They strategize. One bird will flush prey from cover while two or three others position themselves at likely escape routes, waiting. It’s collaborative hunting at a level we usually associate with wolves or orcas, not birds.
The thing is, this behavior only makes sense when prey is scarce and hiding spots are abundant—desert scrubland dotted with mesquite and cactus, basically. A single hawk might spend hours trying to dig out a jackrabbit from under a creosote bush and still come up empty. But a group? They can cover multiple exits simultaneously.
The Leapfrog Strategy That Shouldn’t Work But Definately Does
Here’s where it gets weird. Harris hawks employ what biologists call “leapfrogging.” One bird perches on a saguaro, scanning. When it spots movement, it swoops down—not necessarily to catch anything, just to disturb the landscape. That forces a cottontail or ground squirrel to bolt. Meanwhile, hawk number two has already repositioned ahead of the likely escape path. If the prey dodges that ambush, hawk three is waiting further out. They take turns being the flusher and the catcher, rotating roles mid-hunt.
I’ve seen footage of this, and it looks almost choreographed. The hawks don’t screech at each other or signal obviously. They just… know. Researchers think they’re reading each other’s body language and flight patterns in real time, adjusting on the fly—literally. It’s the kind of split-second coordination that implies some serious cognitive horsepower, maybe even a rudimentary theory of mind. Wait—maybe that’s overstating it. But they’re definitely tracking not just where the prey is, but where their teammates are and where everyone’s about to be.
Why Cooperation Beats Competition When You’re Starving in the Sonoran Desert
Most raptors are fiercely territorial. They’ll dive-bomb their own offspring if they linger too long after fledging. Harris hawks are the exception, and the reason comes down to math. In environments where prey is unpredictable and well-hidden, the caloric payoff from a solo hunt often doesn’t justify the energy expenditure. You burn more calories chasing than you gain from eating. But if you’re hunting in a group of five and you catch something every third attempt instead of every tenth, suddenly the equation flips.
The hawks also share the spoils, which is rare among birds of prey. The individual who made the kill doesn’t hog the carcass. Everyone eats, usually in a pecking order determined by age and dominance, but nobody goes hungry if the hunt succeeded. This kind of resource-sharing requires trust—or at least an instinct that mimics it. Younger birds learn the patterns by watching older ones, sometimes for a full year before they’re allowed to participate in the more complex maneuvers.
The Relay Race Nobody Signed Up For But Everyone Runs Anyway
Anyway, there’s this one hunting tactic that researchers didn’t even believe was real until they caught it on video. It’s called the “relay flush,” and it’s exactly as exhausting as it sounds. A rabbit hides under a bush. Hawk one dives at the bush. Rabbit doesn’t move. Hawk two dives from a different angle thirty seconds later. Still nothing. Hawk three tries. Then four. Then back to one. They keep up this rotation for sometimes fifteen or twenty minutes, each dive just slightly more aggressive, until the rabbit’s nerves shatter and it bolts into the open—straight into hawk five, who’s been waiting patiently the entire time on a low branch exactly where rabbits always run when they finally panic.
It’s brutal. It’s also kind of genius.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’d call it empathy or just highly refined self-interest. The hawks aren’t helping each other out of kindness—they’re maximizing thier own survival odds in a landscape that punishes loners. But the result is the same: a hunting strategy so effective that Harris hawks have become one of the few raptor species whose populations are actually stable, even thriving in some areas, despite habitat loss. Cooperation, it turns out, isn’t just for mammals. Sometimes the sky’s most ruthless predators succeed precisely because they’ve learned to work together.
