Instinctively, I doubt it. But they can pick up on the air moving around from you trying to swat at it, which is why it’s such a pain in the ass to capture to release or kill one. They are able to tell well before they’re captured/caught that something is coming for them.
This BU blog entry from 2012 gives a lot of interesting information on the many ways they are able to evade us.
Docker, if you can run it on your hardware (either your normal system or on dedicated hardware) is a Swiss army knife that can help level up your acquisitions, and provides you with an isolated application environment if you don’t want to install the applications directly to your device. For media specifically, there is a suite of applications under the same *arr naming scheme that allows you to index, monitor for releases of, and acquire different television shows, movies, music, and books.
Some container maintainers build in different capabilities into their torrent client containers, such as Binhex’s qBittorrent and Deluge applications, that have VPN connectivity built in, so any network traffic running through that container will automatically use your VPN provider’s WireGuard or OpenVPN capabilities, depending on who you use. Once you have that running and your tags tuned in the *arr apps, you have a headless, mostly independent machine constantly working on acquiring and upgrading your media.
Sidenote: the *arr apps can be controlled by mobile apps like LunaSea on iOS, and nzb360 on Android. The latter can also integrate with your torrent clients.
You should post this over on one of the Self Hosted communities. I’m sure they would appreciate this as well.