The Washington Post that the couple would make distinctive penguin 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,” Keen said. “They’ll even check out their partners’ feet, as they incubate their egg on their feet.”Keen recalled Birdland staff getting their expectations up because of behavior exhibited by the penguins, only to be disappointed.
Keen began to note that he had suspicions about Maggie’s sex as she grew taller than her female peers, and began displaying dominant characteristics in the birds’ mating ritual, which female penguins don’t do.Maggie, taking on the more dominant role, began mating with other penguins, including another male named Spike.
This behavior and the lack of an egg led keepers to conduct a DNA test, at which point they discovered Maggie was male.“I wasn’t 100 percent surprised when I found out,” Keen said.Keepers have since renamed Maggie as Magnus, a nod to the bird’s Scandinavian roots. “We’ve told the breeding program, so I’m kind of hoping that gives them an excuse to give me another female,” Keen told the Post.The confusion over the penguin’s gender was caused by the fact that male penguins lack an extruding sex organ, meaning that without a DNA test, it’s difficult to determine gender.Penguins inseminate each other when an opposite-sex pair rub orifices known as cloacae together to transfer sperm, which is produced by males from internal testes.That said, even knowing that Magnus is a male penguin, same-sex behavior is not at all unusual among penguins.