the vast majority of all the anatum peregrines are the offspring of peregrine falcons in breeding programs in Canada and the USA. We were down to single digit breeding pairs south of the about 50 degrees North as I recall. So breeding programs were set up - the Wainwright facility in Alberta was probably the most productive over the years, but there were a couple of others, one at the Saskatoon Vet College and the other at the Raptor Centre at McGill University (both of these programs had different names but in 30 years, they've changed so I've omitted them here). About the time the species was downlisted federally, the Wainwright breeding facility closed and I believe both McGill's and Saskatoon's operations are much smaller now. There are some private breeders now that provide them to projects like ours (remember the foster chicks in 2008?) and/or release them into the wild themselves. Since breeding peregrines uses alot of falconry techniques, lots (if not most) breeders are falconers as well.
So captive-bred means, bred in captivity either for falconry purposes or for release into projects like ours.
There is no such thing as "hack-bred" but rather "hack-released". Hacking is a technique recovery projects like ours has used to release fledge age birds into an area. All of our early releases were hack releases of captive-bred birds. Hacking involves putting fledge age birds in a kind of peregrine jail for a week so that they become imprinted on the location. Food is provided by unseen humans while in "jail" and then one day, the bars are removed and the young birds fledge just like wild chicks. Because they are imprinted on the location, they return there for food. The trick with this is to not let the birds imprint on the humans feeding them. So food delivery is done when the birds can't see you. For example, birds hacked from the roof of a building like we have downtown, can't learn that opening the roof door means that someone will come out with food. In fact, the birds can't see humans delivering food at any time, that way humans remain a threat and are to be treated as targets.
Does that help to sort out the confusion Kinderchick?
