Meet the only raptors known to hunt in packs. Some Harris’s hawks work in teams with a whole playbook of tricks – and if you’re a rabbit or a lizard, they’re the last things you want on your tail.“It’s amazing to watch,” says ecologist Jennifer Coulson of the Orleans Audubon Society in Pearl River, Louisiana. Coulson is hoping to understand how cooperative hunting works in the wild, where it’s been observed in groups of two to nine wild Harris’s hawks. But she and her husband, both avid falconers, also have their own trained hunting team, which allows them to see such behaviour up close. First there’s “backstanding”, which looks how it sounds. “Two or three hawks will stand on each other, so they look like a hawk totem pole,” Coulson says. The hawk on top, which is careful to not hurt its living perch by digging in its talons, gets a better vantage point when scanning for prey

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