Then why do we name them? ”
WE name them because we feel a need to, because we want to “own” them by the process of naming them (there is a nice reference to this in the old testament – Genesis.
Some agencies refuse to allow names, for example in Pennsylvania. This is very upsetting to the watchers and they refuse to use the (seemingly cold) terms female and male or falcon and tiercel for the birds they watch, rather calling them Mom and (little) Dad – little being the differentiation between the male first observed for several seasons, who then wound up in a rehab station after injuries and now is an education bird, and the current male.
But June is right, we are only observing the falcons and, in some cases, helping where necessary and possible, but trying not to behave as if we own them as pets. We love Mariah and her mates, but they do not love us back. It is purely platonic, an “amour de loin”. Thus, we should not to invest too much emotional energy in them. There are so many places where such an investment would be appropriate: literacy programs, feeding the hungry of the world, curing the sick, caring for abandoned or abused pets, environmental protection programs in general but not one specific individual (another example of this is the polar bear Kurt in Berlin, who was supposed to be the symbol of the endangered species and the melting of the arctic ice, but instead has been the focus of cult-like attention).

I think attachment is a good thing. It allows us to appreciate the magnificence of peregrines and other animals. It leads us to want them to flourish.

Jeanne

“The greatness of a nation

and its moral progress can be judged

by the way its animals are treated”

Mohandas Gandhi

I hate seeing Mariah pecking at the net at Kodak tower. It’s sad because we have bonded with her and it’s painful to see her struggling. Is there a chance that she could get stuck in the net?

June Summers stated that we should stay “detached from them, because they’re not our birds! We can’t assign human characteristics to them.”

Then why do we name them? I know this is nature, and we can’t change it, but we also can not change our feelings. We love these birds and we can’t help but care what happens to them.

Their answer is that all the evidence points to Peregrine females being able to store usable sperm for only a couple of days. Under controlled laboratory conditions some artificial insemination efforts have produced 2 or 3 eggs from a single insemination, but the timing has to be very precise. In the wild that’s not likely to happen.

Since it takes about two days for the egg to form and be laid, Mariah needs to have a pretty steady supply of sperm while she’s in her egg-laying phase in order to produce viable eggs. That’s one reason why we continue to see copulation behavior throughout the egg-laying cycle.

So it doesn’t look like any of the mating activity between Mariah and T-C would have resulted in laying fertilized eggs.