A precocious and sexually domineering king penguin enlisted for a breeding initiative in an England zoo — and thought to be a female — has turned out to be a boy.
Penguin Maggie traveled from Denmark to the Birdland Park and Gardens in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, England in 2016. Her keepers had high hopes she would produce an egg. When Maggie reached sexual maturity in 2020, she displayed flirtatious behavior with a male named Frank.
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Alas, the couple did not produce an egg.
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“Same again in 2021. Same again in 2022,” Alistair Keen, Birdland’s head keeper, told The Washington Post. “In 2023, they were seen mating quite regularly.”
The flirting, Keen said, involved various behaviors like making distinctive penguin noises and posturing.
“They do a low trumpeting call, which is basically them saying, ‘I’m free and I’m single. Who’s interested?’ And whoever’s interested then shouts back,” said Keen. “They’ll even check out their partners’ feet, as they incubate their egg on their feet.”
Keen said staff were giddy for a chick when Frank sat with his tummy tucked over his penguin feet, a usual sign of warming an egg.
“But he was incubating a leaf,” Keen said.
The head keeper said his suspicions about Maggie’s sex rose as the penguin grew taller than her female peers.
“This penguin has looked very tall compared to everyone else,” he said. She also displayed dominant characteristics in the birds’ mating ritual, “which female penguins don’t do.”
Male penguins lack an extruding sex organ, which complicates sexing the avian animals. Insemination takes place when an opposite-sex pair rub orifices (called cloacae) together to transfer sperm, produced by males from internal testes.
Maggie’s rubdowns grew to include other boy birds besides Frank. She was also seen mating with another male called Spike.
The mystery of Maggie’s eggless encounters was finally solved when keepers conducted a DNA test on the bird’s feathers in October.
It turns out Maggie is a male.
“I wasn’t 100% surprised when I found out,” Keen said.
In honor of the bird’s far-Northern roots, “We’ve renamed him with the fine Scandinavian name of Magnus,” Keen said.
Is the bird formerly known as Maggie gay? Could be. Cohabitating male penguins have famously incubated chicks together and mourned one another’s passing, just like humans. Males are also known to display mating behaviors with other males, even as they father chicks with a female partner.
“We’ve told the breeding program, so I’m kind of hoping that gives them an excuse to give me another female,” Keen said.
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