Two male flamingos adopted a chick after successfully hatching an egg together at San Diego Zoo Safari Park in California in 2024.
Earlier in the year, the same-sex bird couple impressed zookeepers with their parenting skills after they were given a dummy egg to sit on. Eventually, the specialists gave them a real egg, which hatched in September and is now “thriving”.
In a social media post, the zoo said that the flamingo couple “has perfected their fatherly duties by alternating brooding responsibilities and keeping the chick satisfied thanks to a hearty helping of crop milk every day”.
The pair feed their chick crop “milk” from their upper digestive tract, and that “both males and females can feed the chick this way”, even flamingos that are not the parents.
The two foster dads are both in their 40s and are lesser flamingos, a species found in sub-Saharan Africa and western India, according to the zoo. The chick is also a lesser flamingo.
But this isn’t the first time a same-sex flamingo couple have become parents to an adopted chick.
Also in 2024, Chilean flamingos Curtis and Arthur hatched an egg at a Zoo in the UK, which an expert theorised could have been abandoned by another couple.
