i don't think you're looking at "protective hawks" in these videos. it seems to me as though the hawk is misinterpreting the drone as something it can eat. the way it comes in with the talons is hunting behaviour. if you compare it to a video of a hawk swooping in on a swallow...
probably a european swallow, btw.
some animals are pretty smart. birds, for the most part, really aren't.
kenmtb
hence the term "bird brain"
Indy The Great
Birds aren't smart? Crows, ravens and parrots are pretty much as smart as non-great apes and will do stuff as complex as dropping nuts in the street to let cars break the shells open then waiting for the traffic signal to change to retrieve the nut. They'll also make tools, completely understand human speech, solve multi-step problems, etc.
deathtokoalas
well, i said "for the most part". there's some counter-examples. but if you took an average intelligence of birds and compared it to an average intelligence of mammals, you're going to see the birds drop off rather considerably.
that doesn't mean birds are void of any kind of awareness - that's clearly not true. but they tend to be overdriven by a prey response, which sometimes gets them into trouble - eating old rusty cans and nails and cigarette butts and other shit that's just not good for them. mammals tend to operate on more of a curiosity response. like, if you put a rover out in the woods you can expect that a bear will trash it, but it will be out of trying to figure out what the fuck it is rather than trying to eat it.
and i think that hawk may have tried to take a bite out of that thing if it managed to catch it. because it's not a bright species.
