Tickled pink! First-time flamingo foster dads raise chick at San Diego zoo

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A pair of first-time flamingo foster dads are raising a chick after successfully hatching an egg together at San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

The duo, both in their 40s, had been sitting on a fake egg earlier this year and did such a good job that specialists gave them a real egg. The chick, the zoo has said, is “thriving.”

Adorable footage released by the zoo shows the small furry grey chick, which is about the size of a tennis ball, being nutured by its foster parents.

In a statement on social media, the zoo said: “​​The pair has perfected their fatherly duties by alternating brooding responsibilities and keeping the chick satisfied thanks to a hearty helping of crop milk every day.”

Both males and females can feed chicks using crop milk, which is secreted from a part of a flamingo’s digestive tract that stores food before digestion. The secretion of the milk is stimulated by begging calls of the hungry chick, according to the zoo.

A flamingo parent could lose its famous pink feather hue during the nesting period, as secreting large volumes of crop milk turns them almost white.

Not the first same-sex success story, Curtis and Arthur, a pair of Chilean flamingo dads, were documented hatching a chick in a UK zoo in August reported the Guardian.

In the US, Freddie Mercury and Lance Bass – a famous same-sex flamingo couple at Denver Zoo — split up in 2022 after a harmonious stint together where they had “acted as surrogate parents” for breeding pairs who were unable to raise flamingo chicks, reported HuffPost.

Bass and Mercury endured an “amicable” breakup after Mercury, then 52, coupled up with a much younger female bird, said the outlet.