It’s an Albany expression.

I was about to call fake on this -- Americans from south Jersey are largely unfamiliar with the present perfect and would not say "[I] have never heard of" but "[I] never heard of" instead.

But it turns out this grammatical cue is an effective way to discover that the comment is not about an American south Jersey but a British one.

Nit pick, but it’s natural selection

The cars aren’t evolving the birds, but they are selecting the fittest.

Perhaps for the same reason that people skydive or engage in other risky behavior.

Why waste energy giving someone else a free shot at whatever you're finding it worth your time to stand in the street over? It isn't that someone else wants that dropped french fry or whatever. It's that everyone else does.

This is quite common prey animal behavior. Larger predators have a harder time adapting to rapid turns made just as the jaws/claws are about to snap shut.

Not a bird but as a human, it’s fun.

Adrenaline is hell of a drug… and the best one.

When I was in college, I once walked down a sidewalk that had been taken over by geese. Twenty or thirty big geese, sat down on the ground, who didn't even bother to get up on their feet I as I passed by. I wondered how they knew I wouldn't kick them, as I easly could have, and I concluded they had figured out that polite humans would just walk around them. Which I did.

I've seen the similar behavior from the ducks and geese in my neighborhood. Not as extreme, but sometimes I'm out for a walk, and they'll keep a wary eye on me, but will be content with the situation at 6-10 feet away, and won't actually take off unless I try to chase them. I don't think it's so much that they're "cutting it close" as that they're justifiably confident that humans are too slow to catch them at that distance and generally don't even try. But on the other hand, different groups of them seem to have different distances they're comfortable with. It's not like they've all solved the same optimization problem to three decimal places - some are confident and some are wary.

Of course, there are lots of stories of animals who got overly familiar with humans right up until the humans surprised them. As a funny example, I remember one time a cat that had grown up around my not-very-athletic family escaped the house and had to be brought back inside. At one point, it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off. This wasn't its first time running from us, but it had never run from him before, and it clearly didn't think humans could be that fast.

I don't think animals optimize as hard for benefit in everything as biology might lead you to believe. They build experience. They make mistakes. They're very cautious in new situations, but they can also be confident to the point of cocky if they think they know what you can't do. There's lots and lots of videos of cocky animals guessing wrong. It makes sense to me that maybe every individual animal isn't prudently optimizing hard for its own survival so much as that the group of them, with different temperaments, try different things and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't and maybe there's a balance between weeding out dumb ideas and retaining the capacity to try things.

I think the idea that animals are always optimizing for survival and that everything must be for some benefit is misleading anyway. I mean, in an ultimate sense, you could say the same thing about humans, that they must always be optimizing for survival and reproduction, and whether or not that's true, it's definitely not true in a simple and obvious way on the level of day-to-day activities. We do a lot of dangerous and dumb and non-productive stuff. I don't think animals are different.

In fact, it makes sense to me to leave some reserve capacity. If surviving in good times takes all your time and energy, what are you going to do in hard times? Therefore animals typically have a lot of time for goofing off, and that certainly seems to me like what they're doing most of the time. They would similarly have room for trying stupid things and taking unnecessary risks.

A favorite video on the topic: https://youtu.be/UezzQSUwIgo

Search for "flicker fusion rate" to learn a lot more about this.

In the US, buzzard is pretty much always slang for a turkey vulture. The common buzzard in Europe/Asia is a different bird entirely.

Sure. I'm just talking about the impression they give in life. But I suppose in that sense the other birds must find a peregrine much more striking, and it very belatedly occurs to me that peregrines no doubt look smaller and more gracile to me for the higher altitudes their stooping hunting habit would require. When I do occasionally see them on approach to their nearby nest, I'm struck by their relative size. So yeah, between that and reviewing my Sibley's the error here is mine, though - for that matter, likely also because - I do find all falcons rather streamlined and compact in impression compared with accipiters or buteos.

They’re surprisingly well adapted to a large range of temperatures because of the species found in temperate rainforests at higher altitudes. They frequently enough escape from pet stores and zoos that there are many sizable populations spread out around the world. The one nearest me is the infamous Pasadena parrots [1] which is made up of thousands of birds likely built up over decades of escapes. There are populations in Chicago, New York, Rome, Tokyo, and plenty of other cities in the world.

[1] https://www.lafieldguide.com/p/the-pasadena-parrots

Here are some pictures taken out of my home office window too:

https://m.galaxybound.com/@vidar/114256153547342202

And a short walk from mine:

https://m.galaxybound.com/@vidar/114582595390607406

They're everywhere at this point.

They have a much stronger sense of propriety than most humans. So really do most animals other than us and perhaps some close relatives. I'm not actually sure that says anything in our favor.