2 Flamingo Dads Successfully Hatch Adopted Chick Together

A same-sex flamingo couple at an English zoo has welcomed a fluffy new family member.

Curtis and Arthur, two male Chilean flamingos at Paignton Zoo in Devon, are the zoo’s first same-sex pair to “successfully hatch and raise a chick together,” the organization announced Monday on social media .

Zoo staff members “aren’t entirely sure” how the two got their egg, but the “most likely scenario is that the egg was abandoned by another couple” and then “adopted” by Curtis and Arthur, bird curator Pete Smallbones said in a news release .

The news that Curtis and Arthur hatched an egg and “are now rearing” the chick was no surprise for anyone in the zoo’s “bird department,” Smallbones told the Guardian .

Same-sex parents have been observed numerous times in the avian world. Same-sex flamingos and penguins in particular often make headlines.

In the early 2000s, two male flamingos named Carlos and Fernando at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust in Gloucestershire, England, were spotted stealing eggs from other flamingos to raise as their own. But the two did such a great job at protecting and hatching eggs that staff members at the wildlife reserve ultimately gave them an egg that had been left abandoned in a nest.

It’s not all fun and feathers, however. In Colorado in 2022, Freddie Mercury and Lance Bass — the Denver Zoo’s famous same-sex flamingo couple — split up after several years together, during which they had “acted as surrogate parents” for breeding pairs unable to raise chicks. The breakup, which was described as “amicable,” happened after the then-52-year-old Freddie paired up with a much younger female bird.