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Peregrine Falcons Defy Extinction By Having Sex With A Hat
Has there ever been a more noble pastime than the fine art of falconry? Throughout history, the bluest of bloods and sophisticated of hunters have kept these birds of prey as their companions, relying on their great speed, perception and cunning to catch their quarry. And no falcon is more impressive than the peregrine, whose swooping speed of 200 miles per hour makes it the fastest creature in existence. And it's that quickness that their handlers value most of all when it's time for these noble birds to come down and jizz onto their masters' heads.
By the 1950s, the lightning-fast peregrine falcon was no longer able to outrun extinction. Like many others, the proliferation of DDT pesticides had poisoned the species, making their eggshells so fragile that mama birds would crush their offspring. By the 1960s, falconers realized that the only chance of keeping the birds alive was to keep them in captivity, where careful breeders could make falcons without breaking some eggs. But kept in cages, falcons became finicky lovers on par with pandas, so to breed them efficiently, a falconer named Lester Boyd came up with the ultimate falcon aphrodisiac: a sex hat.
Peregrine falcons are fast at everything, and that includes imprinting. When born, they'll assume kinship with whatever they see at the drop of a hat, whether that's another falcon, a human, or ... a hat. Some careful conditioning can trick young peregrines into accepting special "copulation hats" as members of their own species, sexy, sexy members. The honeycombed bowlers are specially designed to efficiently catch every drop of falcon spunk, allowing it to be soaked up via syringe to be inseminated in a nearby female peregrine falcon -- which is also conditioned to see big, featherless humans as the hottest birds on the block.
But often, the sight of the rubber hat alone isn't enough to get the falcons fired up. So a human handler is forced to act like the Cyrano de Bergerac of sexing birds, donning the hat and making the appropriate mating calls to romance the peregrine into some intense lovemaking. Fortunately, this sexhatravaganza strategy has borne falcon fruit and over 6,000 peregrines have been reintroduced into the American wild, almost every single one of them owing their existence to their dad going to pound town on some dude's skull.
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Leopard Slugs Use Their Head-Penises To Engage In Upside Down Bang Ballets
You wouldn't expect slugs, nature's sentient used condom, to be amazing lovers. Not only are they slow (downright sluggish, even), they're also hermaphrodites, content to go love themselves if no one else is interested. Even if two slimy bachelor/ettes meet in the night, some species of slugs are so bad at foreplay they'd prefer to just love-stab each other than to engage in consensual sensuality.
Wikimedia Commons/ Joris M. Koene, Hinrich SchulenburgAlso known as Shakespearing.