Can Animals Be Gay?
By Jon Mooallem (nytimes.com, 29/3/2010)
“THERE’S TWO mating right there,” Lindsay Young called out.
They were right below her, 10 yards away on a flat, vegetated ridge. It was late afternoon. One albatross lay on its stomach, wobbling with its wings pulled back — the way penguins slide over ice — while a second stood upright behind it, fat rippling down its telescoping neck, as it pumped its pelvis. “That looks pretty standard,” Young said.
The birds carried on for a while. Then the male shivered and retracted. The female came to her feet and walked off. Young read the female’s leg band with her binoculars. “You just hit the jackpot,” she told me. The bird was part of a female-female pair. The male had another mate.
Young started scribbling notes, and we sat there rapidly rehashing the details. The sex didn’t seem forced at all. In a rape, Young said — which, for all the talk of albatross monogamy, is not uncommon in the species — a male will pin a female’s neck to the ground, or back her into a bush to tangle her up. (One study observed four different gangs of males forcing themselves on a single female, which lost an eye in the process.) But these two birds hardly seemed in a rush. Young made more notes. Then, with the male bird frozen right where he’d been left, the female slapped her rubbery feet on the ground, caught an updraft and disappeared over the ocean.
The next morning, Young still seemed to be assuring herself that her interpretation of what we’d seen was reasonable. “We didn’t see how it started, but how it ended looked . . . ” — she searched for a precise, nonanthropomorphic phrase. She couldn’t really find one, and let out a self-effacing laugh. “Mutually beneficial?” she said. “I don’t know!”
Dave Leonard, a friend of Young’s, was tagging along. Leonard — tall, lanky and tan, with a ponytail and a few days of scruff — is an ornithologist but works a desk job now for a state wildlife agency and seemed to be enjoying a morning outside. He brandished a gigantic telephoto lens in all directions and had trouble recovering after realizing he’d forgotten to pack his binoculars. Leonard knows his birds, but he was here as a bird lover, not a bird researcher, and wasn’t overly concerned with scientific detachment. When Young pointed out a male albatross whinnying at every female that passed overhead, Leonard shook his head and joked, “I feel your pain, dude.”
Eventually, Young spotted a female from one of the female-female pairs calling to a male about 15 feet away. The female was standing right where the male and his partner usually build their nest. Her head was straight up in the air, and she clapped her beak animatedly. In Young’s experience, it was rare for a bird to call so determinedly to another that’s not her partner; this would definitely count as “solicitation,” she said, if the two birds wound up copulating. “Pull up a rock,” she told me and Leonard.
We sat on the ground expectantly for a while. Eventually, the male albatross took a few steps toward the calling female. Then it stopped and looked around. It was comical, given the circumstances.
“ ‘Will anyone see me if I cheat?’ ” Young said. “I’m not sure if he’s taking her up on it, or just going, ‘Why are you in my spot?’ ” She was doing the bird’s interior monologue, narrating for one blameless, anthropomorphic moment.
The male stopped again and tucked his beak into the feathers behind his neck. Then he turned around and retreated. The taut sexual anticipation — at least as felt by us three humans — seemed to let up. “Well, his partner should be very proud of the self-control,” Young said. Then she said, “I know when to cut my losses,” gathered up her backpack and clipboard full of hard-earned data and trudged off to watch some other birds.
MORE THAN 4,000 miles across the Pacific, at a place called Taiaroa Head in southeastern New Zealand, two female Royal albatrosses (a related species) were building their nest. Later that winter, those two birds would become one of only a few known female-female pairs to successfully fledge a chick at Taiaroa Head in more than 60 years of continuous observation of the colony. (Two years before, the same two birds had engaged in a threesome, presiding over a single nest with the help of one male — just another “alternative mating strategy” albatrosses sometimes engage in, it turns out.)
The tourism board of Dunedin, a gay-friendly region of New Zealand, held a publicity-grabbing contest to name the “lesbian albatross” couple’s chick. For months, as the paired females incubated their egg, a press officer at Tourism Dunedin issued releases, and news organizations around the world, from England to India, ran with the story. The P.R. woman also tried to interest me in a story about a flightless kakapo bird in the region named Sirocco who’d recently made a memorable appearance on the BBC — “He actually started to shag the presenter, Mark Carwardine!” she wrote to me — and “has avid followers on Facebook and Twitter!”
A biologist working with the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, Lyndon Perriman, seemed to bristle at the idea of naming any albatrosses — “They are wild birds,” he wrote to me in an e-mail message. He noted that the female-female pair made for an inconvenient tourist attraction because their nest was not visible from any of the public viewing areas. It seemed fitting: people’s ideas about the couple were riveting enough; it wasn’t necessary to see the actual birds. The chick hatched on Feb. 1. Tourism Dunedin named it Lola. The shortlist also included Rainbow, Lady Gagabatross and Ellen.
By Jon Mooallem (nytimes.com, 29/3/2010)
“THERE’S TWO mating right there,” Lindsay Young called out.
They were right below her, 10 yards away on a flat, vegetated ridge. It was late afternoon. One albatross lay on its stomach, wobbling with its wings pulled back — the way penguins slide over ice — while a second stood upright behind it, fat rippling down its telescoping neck, as it pumped its pelvis. “That looks pretty standard,” Young said.
The birds carried on for a while. Then the male shivered and retracted. The female came to her feet and walked off. Young read the female’s leg band with her binoculars. “You just hit the jackpot,” she told me. The bird was part of a female-female pair. The male had another mate.
Young started scribbling notes, and we sat there rapidly rehashing the details. The sex didn’t seem forced at all. In a rape, Young said — which, for all the talk of albatross monogamy, is not uncommon in the species — a male will pin a female’s neck to the ground, or back her into a bush to tangle her up. (One study observed four different gangs of males forcing themselves on a single female, which lost an eye in the process.) But these two birds hardly seemed in a rush. Young made more notes. Then, with the male bird frozen right where he’d been left, the female slapped her rubbery feet on the ground, caught an updraft and disappeared over the ocean.
The next morning, Young still seemed to be assuring herself that her interpretation of what we’d seen was reasonable. “We didn’t see how it started, but how it ended looked . . . ” — she searched for a precise, nonanthropomorphic phrase. She couldn’t really find one, and let out a self-effacing laugh. “Mutually beneficial?” she said. “I don’t know!”
Dave Leonard, a friend of Young’s, was tagging along. Leonard — tall, lanky and tan, with a ponytail and a few days of scruff — is an ornithologist but works a desk job now for a state wildlife agency and seemed to be enjoying a morning outside. He brandished a gigantic telephoto lens in all directions and had trouble recovering after realizing he’d forgotten to pack his binoculars. Leonard knows his birds, but he was here as a bird lover, not a bird researcher, and wasn’t overly concerned with scientific detachment. When Young pointed out a male albatross whinnying at every female that passed overhead, Leonard shook his head and joked, “I feel your pain, dude.”
Eventually, Young spotted a female from one of the female-female pairs calling to a male about 15 feet away. The female was standing right where the male and his partner usually build their nest. Her head was straight up in the air, and she clapped her beak animatedly. In Young’s experience, it was rare for a bird to call so determinedly to another that’s not her partner; this would definitely count as “solicitation,” she said, if the two birds wound up copulating. “Pull up a rock,” she told me and Leonard.
We sat on the ground expectantly for a while. Eventually, the male albatross took a few steps toward the calling female. Then it stopped and looked around. It was comical, given the circumstances.
“ ‘Will anyone see me if I cheat?’ ” Young said. “I’m not sure if he’s taking her up on it, or just going, ‘Why are you in my spot?’ ” She was doing the bird’s interior monologue, narrating for one blameless, anthropomorphic moment.
The male stopped again and tucked his beak into the feathers behind his neck. Then he turned around and retreated. The taut sexual anticipation — at least as felt by us three humans — seemed to let up. “Well, his partner should be very proud of the self-control,” Young said. Then she said, “I know when to cut my losses,” gathered up her backpack and clipboard full of hard-earned data and trudged off to watch some other birds.
MORE THAN 4,000 miles across the Pacific, at a place called Taiaroa Head in southeastern New Zealand, two female Royal albatrosses (a related species) were building their nest. Later that winter, those two birds would become one of only a few known female-female pairs to successfully fledge a chick at Taiaroa Head in more than 60 years of continuous observation of the colony. (Two years before, the same two birds had engaged in a threesome, presiding over a single nest with the help of one male — just another “alternative mating strategy” albatrosses sometimes engage in, it turns out.)
The tourism board of Dunedin, a gay-friendly region of New Zealand, held a publicity-grabbing contest to name the “lesbian albatross” couple’s chick. For months, as the paired females incubated their egg, a press officer at Tourism Dunedin issued releases, and news organizations around the world, from England to India, ran with the story. The P.R. woman also tried to interest me in a story about a flightless kakapo bird in the region named Sirocco who’d recently made a memorable appearance on the BBC — “He actually started to shag the presenter, Mark Carwardine!” she wrote to me — and “has avid followers on Facebook and Twitter!”
A biologist working with the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, Lyndon Perriman, seemed to bristle at the idea of naming any albatrosses — “They are wild birds,” he wrote to me in an e-mail message. He noted that the female-female pair made for an inconvenient tourist attraction because their nest was not visible from any of the public viewing areas. It seemed fitting: people’s ideas about the couple were riveting enough; it wasn’t necessary to see the actual birds. The chick hatched on Feb. 1. Tourism Dunedin named it Lola. The shortlist also included Rainbow, Lady Gagabatross and Ellen.
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