Perhaps you vaguely remember little more than a year ago when I pointed out the story of two gay flamingos. The pair of males had been together for several years and enjoyed raising children—although they usually became adoptive parents by stealing one or more eggs from other nests, an approach to gay parenthood I do not agree with!
Nevertheless, they had been studied for some time and were found to be some of the best parents in the flock. And that despite their unorthodox relationship.
Guess what?
A pair of flamingos have become proud foster parents after they took an abandoned chick under their wings at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, Great Britain. But this probably doesn’t sound unusual, until you know that the birds, Carlos and Fernando, are two male Greater Flamingos. Despite both being male, they had resorted to stealing eggs from other pairs as they sought to fulfil their desperate desire to start a family of their own.
The facility’s staff were so impressed with the pair’s incubating abilities that when a Greater Flamingo nest was recently abandoned shortly before the egg hatched, Carlos and Fernando were the number one choice to “adopt” the resulting chick.
“Fernando and Carlos are a same sex couple who have been known to steal other Flamingos’ eggs by chasing them off their nest because they wanted to rear them themselves,” said WWT spokeswoman Jane Waghorn. “They were rather good at sitting on eggs and hatching them so last week, when a nest was abandoned, it seemed like a good idea to make them surrogate parents.”
There’s more to the story. The chick hatched before they got the eggs to Carlos and Fernando. How they solved that problem is both creative and cool in the sense that the staff went through special efforts to help the gay couple adopt.