After a long wait for an egg, wildlife park discovers Maggie the penguin is male

For four years, keepers at Birdland Park and Gardens waited patiently for Maggie, their prized female king penguin, to lay an egg.

She kept flirting with the male penguins. There was even mating, particularly with Frank, another penguin in her enclosure.

But never did Maggie, who was imported from Denmark as part of a breeding initiative, hatch a chick, perplexing officials at the wildlife park in the Cotswolds, central England.

The mystery was finally solved this year, when a DNA test conducted on Maggie’s feathers revealed that the 10-year-old penguin had been incorrectly sexed the whole time.

“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.

“We’ve renamed him with the fine Scandinavian name of Magnus,” he said, a nod to the penguin’s origins.

Keen’s team of birdkeepers once had high hopes that the penguin would lay an egg. 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. “Same again in 2021. Same again in 2022. In 2023, they were seen mating quite regularly.”

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?’ And whoever’s interested then shouts back,” said Keen. “They’ll even check out their partners’ feet, as they incubate their egg on their feet.”

Keen recalled one moment in particular when he and his colleagues were particularly hopeful for a chick. “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.”

When the DNA test eventually came back showing the penguin as male in October, Keen said he was not that surprised - there had been signs.

“I’d had my suspicions when Maggie or Magnus began mating the males,” said Keen, referring to Magnus’s assumption of the dominant role in the act. “Which female penguins don’t do.”

The keeper’s suspicions rose further when the penguin set its sights on others, too, he said: “She was also seen mating another one of our males called Spike.”

Size is not a guarantor of a penguin’s sex, but taller king penguins tend to be males. “As it reached maturity, this penguin has looked very tall compared to everyone else,” Keen said. “So I wasn’t 100 percent surprised when I found out.”

The revelation that Magnus was forming same-sex bonds the whole time is not surprising. Such bonds between penguins, like many other animals, have been documented around the world.

Earlier this year, a same-sex penguin pair in Sydney, who had been together for six years, made global headlines after one sang a tribute when the other died. In New York City’s Central Park Zoo, a pair of penguins raised a chick from a fostered egg, inspiring the children’s book, “And Tango Makes Three.”

Their behavior can also be less cute. In the Netherlands, two males went on an egg-stealing rampage - taking one from a heterosexual pair and another from a “lesbian” couple the following year.

“Magnus/gie,” as Keen also referred to the penguin, arrived at Birdland in 2016 as part of a bid to boost wildlife’s number of female king penguins and its overall penguin population.

“We’ve told the breeding program, so I’m kind of hoping that gives them an excuse to give me another female,” said Keen. The mix-up was understandable given how easy it is to misidentify a penguin’s sex, he added.