We have another instance of homosexuality in the animal kingdom to show you.
Sometimes, when homophobes want to show their intolerance, they like to use the argument, “You don’t see birds and bees being gay, do you?!” Well, we here at Instinct love to share stories of gay lions, gay tortoises, bisexual geese, and now gay vultures to prove them otherwise.
Last spring at the Artis Amsterdam Royal Zoo, zoo keepers found an abandoned vulture egg at the bottom of an aviary.
Not being able to do anything else with the bird egg, the keepers planned to put it into an incubator to hatch. But then, the zoo keepers realized that a couple of male griffon vultures, who had been in a relationship for years, were building a nest.
Testing things out, The keepers then put the egg in the new nest, and the male vultures then naturally took over parenting. Not only did they take turns sitting on the egg to keep it warm, but they took care of the baby vulture after it hatched.
As an spokesperson for Artis said last year concerning the gay vultures:
They’re “taking good care of the chick,” he said, “This is not unusual in nature. There are often homosexual couples, especially among birds.”
But sadly, the time that the three vultures had together has come to an end. Last week, the zoo released two young vultures, one of them being the bird raised by the gay vultures, into the wild of the Italian island of Sardinia.
Now, our baby bird will be joining about a dozen other vultures in Artis’s efforts to repopulate the vulture community on that island.
Zoo director Rembrandt Sutorius briefly spoke on the moment that the young vulture took flight and said it was a “very special moment.”
“We could see the vultures floating above the area – a truly magnificent sight.”
