Gay flamingo dads raise adopted chick after successfully hatching egg at San Diego Zoo Safari Park
Two male flamingos have raised a chick at San Diego Zoo Safari Park. (San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance)
Two adorable male flamingos have raised an adopted chick after successfully hatching an egg together at San Diego Zoo Safari Park, California.
Earlier this year, the same-sex birds sat on a dummy egg and impressed the zoo keepers with their parenting skills. Eventually, the specialists gave the animal couple a real egg, “allowing another pair of flamingos to double-clutch and raise a second hatchling”.
The chick, which was born in late September, is now “thriving”. The zoo wrote in a social media post: “The pair have perfected their fatherly duties by alternating brooding responsibilities and keeping the chick satisfied thanks to a hearty helping of crop milk every day.”
The foster fathers can both feed the chick crop “milk”, which comes from the parents’ upper digestive tract. The zoo said: “Both males and females can feed the chick this way, and even flamingos that are not the parents can act as foster-feeders.
“The begging calls the hungry chick makes are believed to stimulate the secretion of the milk.” The foster parents will wean the chick when it is around two months old.
According to the zoo, the two flamingo fathers are in their 40s. The lesser flamingos are a species found in sub-Saharan Africa and western India, with the chick also being the same species.
Lesser flamingos can grow to be 2.6-2.9 feet tall and can weigh up to 1.5-2kg. Upon hatching, a chick is around the size of a tennis ball and has grey feathers instead of its distinctive pink colouring.
A similar scenario cropped up at a UK zoo earlier this year. Chilean flamingos Curtis and Arthur hatched an egg at Paignton Zoo in Devon, which an expert theorised could have been abandoned by another couple.
Zoo staff said the couple, both male, did their part in hatching the zoo’s first round of flamingo chicks since 2018.
