Peregrine falcons set off false alarms to make prey easier to catch, study finds
by Frontiers
“Predators must eat to survive—and to survive, prey must avoid being eaten. One theory, the Wolf-Mangel model, suggests predators could use false attacks to tire prey out or force them to take bigger risks, but this has been hard to show in practice. Now, scientists observing peregrine falcons have found evidence that they deliberately exhaust their prey to improve later hunting success.”
Read more about the hunting strategies of Peregrine Falcons and their interactions with a common prey item for them in the Pacific Northwest—the Dunlin—in this article first published by Frontiers: https://phys.org/news/2023-10-peregrine-falcons-false-alarms-prey.html