Driving up and down the streets of Los Angeles, ornithologist Dan Cooper searches for evidence of hawks’ nests. But he doesn’t scan the trees. He gazes at the asphalt, where the white tones of a hawk’s poop, also known as whitewash, stand out perfectly. “We drive slowly and look for a big splatter of quarter-sized, chalky whitewash,” he says.
Before he began studying how and where L.A.’s raptors build their nests, Cooper gave little thought to bird droppings on the streets. “We’ve all seen bird shit on the ground,” he says, but it sort of fades into the background. “It makes you wonder, What else are you missing?”
These birds of prey, on the other hand, don’t miss much. Spending his days watching raptors go about their days, Cooper has been struck by how attentive they are to their surroundings. He suspects that they have figured out how to survive among millions of bipedal primates—us—through careful observation. They’re not just scrutinizing the crows and the squirrels. They’re also watching us. Bird-watching, in other words, goes both ways.
Indeed, these animals spend their lives becoming attuned to the rhythms of
