| There are plenty of references on same sex pairing on the net, including Australian species: I have come across figures of 20-25% for Black Swans, which would explain why I have seen 3 Black Swans nest building together a couple of times-apparently the boys con the female into egg-laying then chase her off. I have not come across any mention, so far, of cross-species same-sex pairing in Australian species. There is mention on the blog by the Bird Ecology Study Group, of Nature Society (Singapore) http://besgroup.blogspot.com/2006/05/homosexuality-in-birds.html of same-sex cross-species pairings between a Giant Canada Goose and a Snow Goose as well as a House Sparrow and a Brown-headed Cowbird. There is also a blog entry on the Great/Rhinoceros Hornbill pair at http://besgroup.blogspot.com/2006/05/loneliness-makes-strange-bedfellows.html .
An interesting aspect of animal behaviour, or perhaps we should call it animal husbandry
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
On 12/03/2009, at 2:13 PM, Andrew Taylor wrote: On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 07:10:38PM +1100, Carl Clifford wrote: I have just finished an abstract on a paper describing courtship
behaviour between two female Hornbills, one a Great, which played the
male role, the other a Rhinoceros, the female role. Has anyone on the
list observed such behaviour in Australian species? I imagine that
homosexual miscegenation must be fairly uncommon in the animal world.
I'm not entirely sure why but there is a list in Wikipedia, including an assortment of Australian birds. Its taken shamelessly from a well known book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_displaying_homosexual_behaviorAlso recently: http://blogs.chesterchronicle.co.uk/and-finally/2009/03/and-finally-rare-duck-breeding.html Andrew |
