The Dog Who Looks Up

Why does Erwitt always check the sky — and what does science actually say about that?

I was out on the front porch this morning with a few of the dogs when a hawk made a lazy pass overhead.

Nothing dramatic. Just a hawk doing hawk things at a polite altitude. But Erwitt caught it.

He looked up, tracked it, and issued what I can only describe as an official perimeter alert. Ears forward, full commitment. The kind of bark that says he has taken this personally.

Then I watched Fleetwood try to figure out what was happening. He looked up tentatively — the way you look when someone else laughs at a joke you didn't quite hear. No bark. No follow-through. Just a long, uncertain squint at the sky 😑.

And from inside the house, through the glass door, Hudson offered a single supportive bark before returning to his spot next to the air conditioning.

Prayerie, also inside at a lovely 72 degrees, did not participate 😆.

He looked up, tracked it, and issued what I can only describe as an official perimeter alert. Ears forward, full commitment. The kind of bard that says he has taken this personally.

What got me was Erwitt specifically. He's the only one of my five who consistently looks up. The others scan the yard, the fence line, the street. Erwitt scans all of that — and then checks the airspace.

I've had people tell me it's a sign of intelligence in dogs, and I always filed that away as one of those things you say about your own dog. But I went looking for the actual science this week.

What Does the Science Say?

Turns out there's something real there, even if it isn't spelled out in those exact terms. Canine cognition researchers break dog intelligence into a few categories. One of them is adaptive intelligence — essentially problem-solving and learning from the environment. A dog that notices what other dogs don't notice, that extends its attention into places other dogs don't think to look — that dog is working at a higher level of environmental awareness.

Looking up isn't instinctive for most dogs. It has to come from somewhere: curiosity, alertness, the mental habit of actually taking in the full picture rather than just the familiar parts.

Whether that makes Erwitt smarter than the others, or just more anxious about aerial threats, I'll leave to the experts.

What I do know is that he's been doing this for years — and every time I watch him do it, I think: that dog is paying attention in a way I find genuinely impressive.

The fact that he also has the energy of a mid-level municipal official who takes his jurisdiction very seriously is, of course, beside the point.

Does your dog look up? I'd genuinely love to know if this is an Airedale thing, a personality thing, or just something certain dogs do that the rest of us haven't been paying close enough attention to.

With love and a wagging tail,

Kim Opdyke  💗