"Maggie is in fact a male penguin," said Alistair Keen, Birdland's head keeper, in a phone interview that he squeezed into his surprisingly busy media schedule Wednesday, as news of the DNA results spread across Britain, apparently delighting the country.
Keen's team of birdkeepers once had high hopes that the penguin would procreate. In 2020, the year that Maggie - as the penguin was then known - came to sexual maturity, it was seen flirting with Frank, another king penguin in the enclosure. "But no egg was laid," said Keen.
At one point we thought we had an egg, because Frank sat with his tummy tucked over his feet," said Keen. "But he was incubating a leaf."
The flirting involved various behaviors, including making noises and posturing: "They do a low trumpeting call, which is basically them saying, 'I'm free and I'm single. Who's interested?'" said Keen.
Collection
[
|
...
]