Gay Vultures Split Up, Then Start New Families

A pair of male vultures at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo who successfully reared two chicks together have split up and started new families with female vultures.

Ten years ago, two male Griffon vultures met and fell in love. They built a nest - as vultures do - but couldn’t produce an egg.

The situation prompted Israeli zoololgist Shmuel Yidov try an experiment: A newly-hatched vulture chick was carefully placed inside a swan’s egg shell and slipped into Dashik and Yehuda’s nest.

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Dashik and Yehuda then raised the vulture chick together. And the couple did such a great job that they were given another baby vulture to raise, which was also a success.

A few years later, however, Dashik and Yehuda split up: Yehuda had fallen in love with a female.

According to Haaretz, Dashik became depressed, and was moved to the zoological research garden at Tel Aviv University. It was there that he paired with a female vulture, and they set up a nest together.

The head of the birds section at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, Michal Erez, describes the events that have since unfolded in this unique love story.

This is an insane coincidence, but the spouses of both Yehuda and Dashik laid an egg on the same day, the eggs hatched on the same April day, and the two chicks were exactly the same weight. Their weight can vary between 120 and 200 grams, and I’ve never seen two hatchlings of the exact same weight.

As for Dashik and Yehuda’s new offspring, they are being kept at the zoo’s national hatching center as part of the captive vulture breeding program.

Image source: istock

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