Gay vulture couple adopt egg after mother rejects it
A pair of gay vultures in a German zoo have adopted an egg abandoned by its mother.
We’ve seen two male lions giving lionesses the cold shoulder and a pair of gay penguins who had only had eyes for each other.
Now its the turn of another – arguably less cute – member of the animal kingdom to promote LGBT equality.
A pair of gay German vultures have recently adopted an egg and started to incubate it in a nest they built.
Animal keepers had collected the egg in the muddy ground under a tree where it had been dropped by a griffon vulture called Lisa, said national news agency DPA.
“Lisa had made no attempt to build a nest,” Nordhorn zoo spokeswoman Ina Deiting told reporters.
The egg was temporarily placed in an incubator, before being entrusted to the male couple, Isis and Nordhorn, who “promptly sat on it,” said Deiting.
The biological parentage of the egg is unclear, and zoo keepers also don’t know yet whether it is fertilised.
The story of Isis and Nordhorn is the second involving gay birds to make news in Germany this month.
Zookeepers at Berlin Zoo recently gave up trying to get two male penguins to breed with female penguins, after it became clear the pair were gay.
The two king penguins, Stan and Olli, had been jetted in as part of the European Endangered Species Programmes (EEP) in order to mate with the zoo’s female penguins.
However, the pair didn’t quite live up to the expectations – when it became clear they were much more interested in having sex with each other.
Same-sex activity is used in the animal kingdom for many reasons, ranging from pleasure-seeking to conflict solving.
Many species form bonds for life with their same-sex partner.
