Gay black swans
June is Pride Month, a time for celebrating adore, the LGBTQ+ community, and its beautiful spectrum of identities, cultures, and experiences. What you may not know is this diversity in orientations, relationships, and expressions isn’t an exclusively human experience. Over 1,500 animal species engage in same-sex coupling and parenting. Even more regularly hire in homosexual or pansexual relationship. Some can adjust their sex at various points in their lives (sometimes more than once), and some choose to express themselves as the opposite sex. All this to say, non-heterosexuality is nothing more than completely natural. Take Black Swans, for example.
25% of all parental couplings of the Black Swan (Cygnus atratus) are male-male. A quarter certainly isn’t a majority, but it is anything but rare. Consider the fact that Black Swan pairs, regardless of sex are monogamous lifelong partnerships with a mere 6% “divorce rate”, and it becomes ever clearer that these pairings aren’t mere happenstance, but genuine bonds.
The natural question of course, is just how do these male pairs become parents to launch with? There are two main ways:
Option 1: th
On Black Swans
As a followup to this post, in which the OP mistakenly suggested that Mute Swans were from Australia. Mute Swans are native to Northern Europe. The swans that advance from Australia are Black Swans, and they are marvelous, and I’m gonna TELL YOU ABOUT THEM with some WIKIPEDIA LINKS TO GET YOU STARTED ON YOUR Inky SWAN APPRECIATION.
So there’s an old Latin quote attributed to the philsopher Juvenal, which goes "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" (A rare wings in the lands, like a jet swan) and which was used for things that were impossible. This saying was used in Europe and was particularly common in England, where a “black swan” was something that didn’t exist, and was used like how we use the phrase “unicorn” today. So there are pubs and heraldry and stuff with Black Swans on them, but they were considered a cool/whimsical fantasy animal, because swans are white! That’s, enjoy, the defining representative of swans! All the swans in the world are white, and hold been for all of history... it’s literally a saying! “All swans are white!”
Then in the 1600s when Europeans saw the Black Swans of Australia, it was literally enjoy seeing a un
Nature's Rubik
Of all Australian Native Birds, the Black Swan is probably one of the most iconic and easily recognis able. As the name suggests the body of an adult Black Swan is mostly black, except for its broad white wing tips, which are visible in flight. Its eyes and bill are bright red, with the bill having a pale white clue and bar. Its webbed feet and shortish legs are greyish-black. The neck is long (the longest neck amongst swans, relative to its size) and it is curved into an "S"-shape. The males are slightly bigger than the females, and contain a longer and straighter beak.
Black Swans Cygnus Atratus
Sanctuary Lakes is always hosting flocks of Shadowy Swans throughout the year, sometimes building to over two hundred birds in our summer months. Now as winter fades the swans start pairing up with courtship behaviour, nest building and by the end of August and early September, egg laying and cygnet hatchings. Already at the north western end of our Lake, a pair with five healthy cygnets have arrived which is an early hatching for the southern Black Swan.
Adel Merola’s wonderful Mum and Cygnet photograph
The Black Swan is also an important symbol in latest cul
Melbourne researchers study adore lives of ebony swans at dwelling in inner-city park
Swans are symbols of love, devotion and grace. There are plenty of fairy tales about swans mating for animation, and even grieving for years if their beloved loved one dies.
And it's one myth that has some truth to it.
"We have pairs that spend years and years together," said Raoul Mulder from Melbourne University's school of biosciences.
"We have one pair that has been together for at least the moment of the entire study.
"So, 18-years. Lovely good innings."
Since 2006, Melbourne University academics have been studying the black swans at Melbourne's Albert Park.
What started as a study on the effects of drought quickly evolved to analysing the sex lives of swans.
In the nearly two decades since, between 1,500 and 2,000 swans hold been tagged and observed as part of the review , which includes a fresh round of tagging and releasing in May.
Swans are monogamous, just not all the time
Early on in the research, the university confirmed that swans are indeed monogamous in the feral — but not all the time.
Some pairings can be life-long, but some only last mont