Goshawk hunt and prey-evasion strategies revealed
Stealth is the goshawk's greatest asset. Plummeting out of the air, the raptors fix their gaze on the oblivious victim below. Intrigued by the birds' attack tactics, Suzanne Amador Kane from Haverford College, USA, decided to find out more about the factors that guide a goshawk during its approach and in the final instants before a strike. However Kane knew that she could only begin to understand the hunters' strategy from a bird's-eye perspective, and to do that she would have to team up with an experienced falconer. She publishes her discovery that goshawks hold victims at one point in their gaze during the first stage of an attack, switching to a parallel pursuit during the final approach, and that victims have to break their attacker's visual fix to escape by turning abruptly in The Journal of Experimental Biology.