Peregrine Falcon's Desire for Nowhere to Rest - In 1960, experts helped save the peregrine falcon from extinction with "sperm caps"

One pet that has been criticized in the pet world is the Teddy. Teddy is actually a grooming option for poodles, but over time has been called what they are called. The male Teddy, as an adult, has a lot of energy and an excessive thirst for the opposite sex, leading them to develop the habit of hugging their lap at home and doing too many things that are not allowed to be seen outside.

As time passes, most owners will throw them a stuffed toy and let them “play” with it as they please. But in nature there is an animal, will also use this release of energy “toy”, this toy is “sperm cap”.

However, they use this tool to produce children and thousands of offspring. And they have also, by some miracle, broken the reproductive segregation between “different species”. This creature is the peregrine falcon, which was on the verge of extinction in the United States in the 1960s.

Peregrine falcons are medium-sized birds of prey, with 18 subspecies and a body length of more than 50 centimeters. The eyes are usually surrounded by a ring of yellow structures. The head to the neck is like wearing a black helmet. The tail also has a few black horizontal stripes, and the underparts are grayish-white with tiny dots on the thorax. They are extremely demanding of their natural habitat, inhabiting mainly the major mountainous hills.

Back in the 1960’s in the United States, the unregulated use of pesticides in large doses led to a vicious cycle of pesticide stockpiling in various organisms. This created a vicious cycle. Insects ate plants containing pesticides, rats and birds ate insects, and peregrine falcons ate rats and birds, so the pesticides were slowly deposited in the bodies of peregrine falcons.

As a direct result, the peregrine falcon lays eggs with a very large loss of calcium and the peregrine falcon’s eggshells become thinner and thinner. Many eggs are crushed by the female peregrine falcon. The reduced hatching rate of peregrine falcon chicks was a major problem at the time, and the peregrine falcon was on the verge of extinction in the United States. At that time, the peregrine falcon population in individual states was in a precarious state.

What can be done to protect peregrine falcons and help their populations to grow? A team led by biologist Cade of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA, came together to establish the Peregrine Falcon Conservation Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of peregrine falcons by artificially interfering with their production and breeding. It is dedicated to the conservation of peregrine falcons and to artificially intervening in their production and reproduction.

In the beginning, the team used only the common method to help peregrine falcons hatch, which was to quietly take the female’s eggs when she wasn’t looking and replace them with fake ones, and then bring the real eggs back to the lab for artificial incubation.

However, the efficiency of this artificial incubation is too low, as peregrine falcons only lay about two eggs per clutch. Therefore, the first thing scientists thought of was to collect sperm from male peregrine falcons and inseminate them artificially.

Peregrine falcons are proud birds by nature, and the degree of cooperation with ordinary livestock in sperm collection is incomparable to the difficulty of artificial insemination. It has also been suggested that the artificially bred peregrine falcons in the peregrine falcon house should adopt the free-love method, allowing the male and female peregrine falcons to breed in a separate room.

However, these peregrine falcons are bred in captivity, and they all have impression followership. This trait is common among poultry or other birds, and when a chick is born, the first creature it sees is its mother, and the first creatures these peregrine falcons see are humans, so it’s hard for them to take an interest in a mate of the opposite sex. This is all detrimental, and it puts peregrine falcon breeding in jeopardy once again.

Peregrine falcons typically breed from April to June each year, and in April of that year, Boyd, a California bird lover, went to a local peregrine falcon sanctuary to feed the peregrine falcons. As soon as they met, a male peregrine falcon swooped down and pointed his hat in a humiliating maneuver. Boyd covered his wounded head and stared at the peregrine falcon.

He suddenly realized that this was the month of the year for peregrine falcons to breed, and he had an epiphany that he had finally found a way to help the peregrine falcon recover his numbers. The peregrine falcon must have mistaken his hat for a female peregrine falcon. So he talked to scientists to see if he could use a hat with a hole in it to help the peregrine falcon store sperm in it.

With the help of many ornithologists and biologists, they made a hat with a special honeycomb-shaped hole, and from April to June of that year, they began to frequent the male peregrine falcon’s room.

This method worked immediately, and for the next few months, scientists would wear these hats. Scientists would wear these hats to mimic the calls of female peregrine falcons to attract males to the peregrine falcons. Many male peregrine falcons left many sperm samples inside the hat.

Afterwards, they found the female peregrine falcons, stroked their feathers to calm them down, and quietly injected the sperm from the male peregrine falcon into the female peregrine falcon. This method has resulted in the breeding of nearly 5,000 peregrine falcons over the next 20 years, and helped to save this endangered species from extinction.