[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Latif Nasser.

LATIF NASSER: Lulu Miller.

LULU: You ready to get wet?

LATIF: Wet?

LULU: Mm-hmm. 'Cause we are hopping in a boat.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: It's cold. It's windy. It's 1972. So in the boat with us is a young married couple, George Hunt ...

GEORGE HUNT: Now I'm just an old doofus.

LULU: ... and Molly Warner.

MOLLY WARNER: We didn't have white hair back then, we had darker hair. [laughs]

GEORGE HUNT: Oh, yes.

LULU: Picture them in flannels, big rubber boots, binoculars around their necks.

MOLLY WARNER: Yeah. All those things.

LULU: And they're about 30 miles off the coast of Southern California, approaching this big, imposing hunk of rock.

GEORGE HUNT: Called Santa Barbara Island.

LULU: It's about a mile across. Treeless.

MOLLY WARNER: Mostly cliff around the edges.

LULU: Totally uninhabited.

MOLLY WARNER: There's no dock there, so you have to row up to waves on rocks and jump off at just the right time.

LULU: And on top of that rock, Molly's gonna spot something that will change the lives of millions of people.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: All thanks to ...

[seagulls squawking]

GEORGE HUNT: Gulls.

LATIF: Gulls like seagulls?

LULU: Mm-hmm. See, George is an ornithologist, and they had traveled all the way out to the island because there was a wild colony out there he really wanted to study.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: Only problem was that it was the middle of the spring semester.

GEORGE HUNT: And I had to teach.

LULU: Back on the mainland at UC-Irvine.

GEORGE HUNT: So I had to leave Molly out there.

LATIF: Oh, man!

LULU: After helping her get set up, he hops on the boat back home. So—but, you know, George is a young professor trying to prove himself, and Molly happens to be trained as an anthropologist.

MOLLY WARNER: Yeah.

LULU: So she agrees to spend a couple months out there, you know, watching.

MOLLY WARNER: Oh, it's amazing to be in a gull colony, and you're just sitting there, and all of a sudden there's a falcon that flies over.

LULU: Hmm.

MOLLY WARNER: The entire colony jumps up into the air and screams and circles.

LULU: Hmm.

LULU: But what she was really there to observe was ...

MOLLY WARNER: Well ...

LULU: ... mating season.

MOLLY WARNER: The female will beg for food going "reek-reek-reek-reek." I don't really remember what the males say.

LULU: I think we actually have George doing that.

MOLLY WARNER: You probably do.

GEORGE HUNT: The male starts making a "coc-coc-coc-coc, coc-coc-coc-coc-coc," waving his wings. He gets on top.

LULU: Steadies his wobbly legs on her back ...

GEORGE HUNT: Puts his cloaca next to hers.

LATIF: Wait, the cloaca is ...

LULU: The private part.

LATIF: Oh.

LULU: It's a little opening. Males and females both have them. And to finish the act, the male kisses his cloaca to hers and ...

GEORGE HUNT: And fertilizes her.

LULU: Can you watch a rejection happen versus a—an acceptance?

GEORGE HUNT: A rejection is the female walks away.

LULU: Okay. [laughs] She's not—she's not subtle.

GEORGE HUNT: It's not that different from a lot of places.

LULU: So anyway, back to Molly. Moon's coming out, stars, winds. This is her existence is on this island. And one morning, it's about a week after the mating has begun.

LATIF: Mm-hmm?

LULU: And she begins walking around looking at the nests, and suddenly eggs are appearing.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: And so she's kind of going on this little Easter egg hunt.

[MOLLY WARNER: One egg.]

LULU: She's just marking ...

[MOLLY WARNER: Two eggs.]

LULU: ... in her little clipboard how many eggs are in each nest.

LATIF: Yeah.

[MOLLY WARNER: Two eggs. Three eggs.]

LULU: When she sees this one nest ...

MOLLY WARNER: That had six eggs in it.

LATIF: Six?

LULU: Right. Which is way more than these birds usually lay.

MOLLY WARNER: It would be like having septuplets.

LULU: And as she goes along ...

[MOLLY WARNER: Two, two, three. Whoop! Six. Whoop! Six.]

MOLLY WARNER: There was a good chunk of them.

[MOLLY WARNER: Whoop! Six. Whoop! Six.]

LULU: ... she's seeing that about one in ten of hundreds of nests has way more eggs than it's supposed to have.

LATIF: Hmm.

MOLLY WARNER: Of course, there weren't any cell phones. That would've been extremely useful.

LULU: Yeah.

MOLLY WARNER: We did have a radio phone thing.

LULU: So she radios to George.

MOLLY WARNER: The communication was so awful.

LULU: Like, "There's too many—crackles—eggs!"

GEORGE HUNT: "You need to come out and see what's going on." And so I did.

LULU: And she shows him around the island, all these nests just brimming with eggs. And ...

GEORGE HUNT: I was absolutely thunderstruck.

LULU: He's never seen or even heard of so many eggs in one single nest.

MOLLY WARNER: So then the question was, what's going on?

LULU: They figured maybe there was something going on inside the birds that was making them pump out so many extra eggs.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: So ...

GEORGE HUNT: Molly went and trapped the birds.

LULU: One of the couples from the nests with tons of eggs.

GEORGE HUNT: I then euthanized them and dissected them.

LULU: Ah, thank you for your service to science that pair. And ...

LATIF: Oh, and they just left six eggs hanging?

LULU: Yeah. Gosh, yeah. That's sad. I didn't even think about that. Yeah, so they left those eggs cold in the wind. Okay. It's a—it's a tra—it's a very sad story.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: So George opens up the first bird, realizes it's the female. This species, the males and females are basically identical. And he looks and he sees the reproductive tract, the ovaries.

GEORGE HUNT: Perfectly fine.

LULU: So then he takes a look at her mate.

GEORGE HUNT: I opened the second bird and we can see the ovaries.

LULU: It's another female.

GEORGE HUNT: I turned to Molly and said, "Are you sure these two actually came from the same thing?"

LULU: Like, this couldn't have been a nesting pair.

MOLLY WARNER: [laughs] Yes, they were.

GEORGE HUNT: You know, she was really quite indignant because she's a very careful scientist, so she said, "I'm absolutely sure." So at that point we knew we had two females incubating eggs in the same nest.

LULU: They go back and check all those other nests with six eggs. They find a way of identifying the sex without euthanizing them, and discover they are all, all of them, females. And as they watch them, they realize that they aren't just, um, "roommates."

GEORGE HUNT: The females will mate with each other.

LATIF: [gasps] Really?

LULU: They're having sex with each other.

LATIF: Wow!

GEORGE HUNT: One of the females—"Reek! Reek! Reek! Reek!"—will get on top of the other female and make the clucking sound as if she's the male. "Coc-coc-coc-coc. Coc-coc-coc-coc-coc." And will raise her wings ...

LULU: Steady her legs and kiss the cloacas. It's the whole same dance.

LATIF: Wow!

LULU: Now they're not actually making babies this way. They'll have to go get fertilized by a male somewhere else.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: But after that happens, the two females come together, and incubate the eggs together, and ...

[cracks]

MOLLY WARNER: The chicks are very cute when they're hatching. These little fuzzy things.

LULU: And when a chick does hatch, these two lady birds take turns ...

MOLLY WARNER: Throwing up their fish for the little guys to eat.

LULU: Giving them the nice baby food.

MOLLY WARNER: Giving them the nice baby food. So the smaller gulls that ...

LULU: All in all, George and Molly found that about 10 percent of the nests on Santa Barbara Island had two moms inside.

GEORGE HUNT: And that was a, "Oh my goodness! This is—this is something new." As far as I know, it was the first documentation of female-female pairing in any wild animal.

LULU: All right, bias alert: Latif, my friend, you may recall that I too am a female-female paired vertebrate.

LATIF: [laughs]

LULU: [laughs] I am a lady married to a lady. We've got two kids. And so when I first heard about this, I was—I was totally charmed by it. And so I thought oh, this will be a fun Mother's Day story, maybe a Valentine's Day story, whatever. I wanted to just tell a little story about it.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

LULU: But when I started looking into it, it turned out that the story of the gulls is so much bigger than the gulls.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: They would become a kind of turning point in our understanding of how homosexuality works in the animal world, and even how we think about and talk about homosexuality in us.

LATIF: Okay. You sold me. All right. Okay, I'm in. Let's go.

LULU: [laughs] Yeah, so to get us there, I guess first off you have to know that at the time George and Molly discovered these gulls, the scientific establishment's official stance on homosexuality was that it was unnatural, not really a part of the natural world, not a part of the animal kingdom. And that is a belief that, as best as I can tell, was born back in the 1200s.

LATIF: Whoa, we're going way back. All right.

LULU: Yeah. So come with me there for a brief moment.

LATIF: Great.

LULU: We're gonna meet a man named Thomas Aquinas, the famous philosopher priest who wrote in one of his most famous works that homosexuality was a quote, "Crime against nature."

LATIF: Ah.

LULU: And this idea, this phrase, this belief, it spread like wildfire all over Western Europe. A lot of the laws that banned homosexuality explicitly used that phrase, "Crime against nature." But then with the rise of science in the 17th and 18th century, you also see how this belief gets embedded there too because whenever scientists did stumble across same-sex mating in animals, which they did ...

LATIF: Uh-huh.

LULU: ... they would either not publish on it—and you can actually see records of, like, the notes that people sat on, or accounts that got flat out rejected from publications. Or if they did write about it, they'd explain it away as, like, a quote, "perversion," or, "aberration."

LATIF: Wow.

LULU: Even "abomination."

LATIF: Scientists using that language.

LULU: Yeah, totally. And then when Darwin comes along in the 1800s, the ideas of evolution end up kind of bolstering the notion that homosexuality shouldn't appear in nature. Basically, if the whole point of life is to reproduce, why would you have a creature that can't reproduce, you know? And then instead of "perverse," it would get labeled with words like, "evolutionary outlier" or "fluke" or "mistake."

LATIF: Right. And in what other scenario are, like, Darwin and the priests, like, pulling in the same direction? You know what I mean?

LULU: Yeah, absolutely. And this sort of strange alignment made it so, like, when a scientist would see a thing in nature, they could still manage to label it as "unnatural."

LATIF: Even though I just saw it in nature.

LULU: Yes. Yes, a hundred percent. And in fact, when George and Molly first tried to publish on the seagulls in the 1970s, the ornithological journal they sent it to rejected it.

GEORGE HUNT: They said, "Well, this is so unusual. We want more data." So we said, "Sure, we'll go get more data." We got more data ...

LULU: So they did. Year after year they kept collecting data, they took photos, they got more and more research assistants to help. And finally ...

GEORGE HUNT: It was officially mind-boggling to us that we said, "Why don't we send this to Science?"

LULU: George finally submits a paper to the journal Science. And in June of 1977, a paper is released called "Female-Female Pairing in Western Gulls, Larus Occidentalis in Southern California." And basically ...

GEORGE HUNT: The world goes crazy.

LULU: ... it sets off this media frenzy.

GEORGE HUNT: The phone doesn't stop ringing.

LULU: George remembers newspapers calling from all over the world ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: Can I speak to George Hunt, please?]

LULU: ... wanting to interview him.

GEORGE HUNT: The London Times, the Melbourne Times.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: Hi there. I'm calling from ...]

GEORGE HUNT: India. All over this country.

LULU: Because in documenting these islands full of homosexual gulls, George and Molly hadn't just challenged a central belief of science, they had clumsily detonated that centuries-old justification that people were still using to try to keep homosexuality a crime. All right, so quick lay of the land: June, 1977, when this paper drops, over a hundred countries and a majority of US states still criminalized homosexuality, many based on Aquinas's old phrase, that it was a quote ...

LILLIAN FADERMAN: Crime against nature.

LULU: This is historian Lillian Faderman.

LULU: We have heard you referenced multiple times as the mother of lesbian history.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: [laughs] I won't call myself that, but if you want to introduce me as that I don't object.

LULU: She lived through this era, and said that ...

LILLIAN FADERMAN: 1977 was a very charged moment in the fight for LGBTQ rights.

LULU: On one hand, there had been all these strides.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: There were the first gay pride parades.

LULU: The medical profession had declassified homosexuality as a mental illness.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: And more and more people started coming out of the closet.

LULU: And winning rights.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: Yes.

LULU: But in response to all that momentum, there came a voice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "In My Little Corner of the World": [singing] Oh, come along with me to my little corner of the world.]

LULU: A woman named Anita Bryant. Maybe you've heard of her.

LATIF: Mm-hmm. Sure.

LULU: She's a pop singer and evangelical Christian.

LATIF: She did, like, the orange juice commercials, right?

LULU: Exactly. She was the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission.

LATIF: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, commercial: [singing] Come to the Florida sunshine tree.]

LULU: And a spokesperson for the anti-gay movement. She called her organization ...

LILLIAN FADERMAN: Save Our Children ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Save Our Children Against Homosexuals, Inc.]

LILLIAN FADERMAN: With the argument that homosexuals, they're very dangerous.

LULU: And to try to convince people of this, she would often point to nature, saying stuff like ...

LILLIAN FADERMAN: "Not even barnyard animals do the disgusting things that homosexuals do." That is, homosexuality is so much against nature that it's not to be found even among animals.

LATIF: She was a notoriously great organizer. Like, she—she could really mobilize people.

LULU: Hugely. And this tactic of pointing to the supposed empirical wrongness or deviance of homosexuals—oh, man, did it work.

[NEWS CLIP: It was a decisive end to Dade County's homosexual controversy.]

LULU: Just two weeks before George and Molly's study dropped, she pulled off her first victory—and it was a big one. She successfully organized voters in Miami to come out and vote to strip away legal protections for gay folks.

[NEWS CLIP: They wanted no part of a law which protects homosexuals ...]

LULU: And so right on the heels of that, when this scientific report on some pretty natural-looking homosexuality comes out ...

GEORGE HUNT: We got some really quite nasty letters about our work. That, you know, this was bad. We were undermining proper beliefs.

LULU: There were editorials slamming George's work, and even Congress jumped in.

LATIF: Really?

LULU: Yeah.

GEORGE HUNT: In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised.

LULU: Yeah. He had received government funding from the National Science Foundation, and some conservative congressmen were so upset about this that ...

GEORGE HUNT: Congress held up the NSF budget.

LATIF: Wow. A tiny tangent. I don't know, for me at least, it still kind of feels that public opinion over the morality of gay relationships or marriages has changed so drastically in the last few decades—at least in this country—it's like genuinely hard to put your mind back to understand, like, the Anita Bryants or the people who can't stomach even a scientist documenting this in seagulls.

LULU: I don't think it's hard to go back there.

LATIF: No?

LULU: I mean, the Anita Bryants are alive and well. They're banning books, they're trying to dial back queer rights based on a really similar argument.

LATIF: Right. Right.

LULU: But the thing I feel like I need to confess, that I didn't even realize until working on this story, is that I held a version of this belief, of Aquinas's old belief, too.

LATIF: Really?

LULU: Yeah. I mean, I didn't grow up with religion. I woke into a world where I realized I was queer at a time where, like, there was so much more acceptance.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: But if I did grow up with anything, it's like my scientist father, evolution. Like, I just—I absolutely believed it was unnatural.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: And I would hear every so—now and then, like, I grew up outside of Boston there were, like, gay swans in Boston Common and I was like, "Oh!" But it felt like a by-product of captivity.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: So about a year ago, when I first heard about George and Molly’s study, like, I had this 40-year delayed version of what happened for a lot of queer people when the study came out.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: I was absolutely thrilled. [laughs]

LULU: That's Lillian Faderman again.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: Gay periodicals all over the country picked up on this immediately.

LULU: They publish cartoons of, like, the gay—the lesbian seagulls, like, pooping in Anita Bryant's eye.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: Yes.

LULU: Here's one!

LATIF: [laughs]

LULU: There were songs.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Lesbian Seagull": Come with me, lesbian seagull.]

LULU: And plays.

PAMELA GRAY: One show actually had two women in seagull outfits.

LULU: That's Pamela Gray. She wrote one of those plays.

GEORGE HUNT: I went to it, and afterward I went up and introduced myself to the director who just about fell over.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: There were boat rides out to go see the gulls.

GEORGE HUNT: I gave up a couple of Sundays to lead trips out to the islands.

EDGAR XOCHITL: We got on a boat.

LULU: This is Edgar Xochitl, a queer ecologist who went out to the island to just commune ...

EDGAR XOCHITL: It was super loud.

LULU: ... with his queer, avian elders.

EDGAR XOCHITL: It was like, "caw, caw, caw!" 24 hours.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: For a time, the lesbian seagull really became, like, a mascot in the gay pride movement.

EDGAR XOCHITL: Yeah.

GEORGE HUNT: Yeah.

MOLLY WARNER: Right.

LILLIAN FADERMAN: Yes.

LATIF: Amazing!

LULU: But in the anti-gay movement, the gulls did not have an effect. Anita Bryant only went on to have more wins in the following years, getting more discriminatory practices in place in other cities. And in the '80s, when the question of homosexuality finally reaches the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick, the justices vote against legalizing homosexual sex for the whole country, again calling it "unnatural" in the opinion.

LATIF: Wow.

LULU: But if you turn, if you mosey on over to the halls of science, you see that the seagull study ushered in a flood, or if I may, a parade of queer animals tromping through onto the scientific record.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Just hundreds of studies. Starting with the hoofed animals.

JOHN MEGAHAN: Deer, giraffe, antelope and gazelles.

LULU: This is John Megahan. He illustrated a whole book of queer animals.

JOHN MEGAHAN: Wild sheep, goats and buffalo.

LULU: And then you got primates.

ELIOT SCHREFER: Chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans.

LULU: That's Eliot Schrefer, who just came out with a book on the science of queer animals.

ELIOT SCHREFER: Bonobo females having sex will get face to face to do it. They will rub their clitorises against each other ...

LULU: Huh.

ELIOT SCHREFER: ... to have loud, rapturous orgasms.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: Ooh!

LULU: Heading underwater ...

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: We have the clownfish.

LULU: This is Christine Wilkinson. She's a biologist and ecologist.

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: And the Amazon River dolphin.

LULU: Is that the pink one?

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Yeah, they're pink.

LULU: Okay.

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: They love cuddling, which I think is very sweet.

LULU: Mmm!

LATIF: Oh, that’s nice.

ELIOT SCHREFER: There's also, like ...

JOHN MEGAHAN: Whales, seals, manatees ...

ELIOT SCHREFER: ... bottlenose dolphins. Males will bond for life. And a study put it at 2.4 times an hour on average that the males are having sex with each other.

LULU: That's—so much!

ELIOT SCHREFER: It sounds exhausting.

LULU: Just when I thought I'd covered all of them ...

JOHN MEGAHAN: Rattlesnakes.

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Hyenas.

JOHN MEGAHAN: Marsupials, hedgehogs, rodents.

LULU: ... they just kept coming.

JOHN MEGAHAN: Bats.

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Having oral sex with each other.

LULU: In flight?

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Upside down!

LULU: Oh, I love it!

JOHN MEGAHAN: And you have birds: geese, swans and ducks, swallows, warblers, finches, sparrows, blackbirds and crows, birds of paradise, other birds.

LULU: But the animal that really took the cake for me is this striped little lizard called ...

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: The New Mexico whiptail lizard. This entire species is made up of females.

LATIF: You can have a species with no males?

LULU: Turns out you can.

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: These lezzy lizzies actually simulate copulation with each other, which increases their fertility.

LULU: They then reproduce asexually, but instead of popping out a clone ...

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: They produce twice the number of chromosomes ...

LULU: Okay.

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: ... which get recombined to form more genetically diverse offspring.

LULU: [gasps]

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Just like they would in a fertilized egg.

LULU: No!

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Yes.

LULU: No!

LATIF: Never heard of that before.

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: So they're freaking gonna persist.

LULU: What the last nearly 50 years of scientific study has revealed is that there is not a single ...

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Banana slug.

LULU: ... corner ...

CHRISTINE WILKINSON: Earthworms.

LULU: ... of this planet where animals are not being super freaking queer.

LATIF: Wow!

LULU: Right? And I do want to just say that I'm focusing on same-sex mating, but the story of sexual fluidity in nature, animals being multiple sexes at once or changing sexes over a lifetime, that has been discovered to be such a deep part of nature, too. But for the same-sex mating thing, as scientists looked closely and measured oxytocin levels or counted offspring survival rates or done the science thing on it ...

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah.

LULU: ... they're seeing all these benefits. Evolutionary benefits. Same-sex mating can strengthen hunting alliances. It can help resolve conflict during resource scarcity. It can reduce stress and strengthen social bonds, which is really good for fitness. And it can even increase the survival rate of offspring.

LATIF: Huh. How?

LULU: So my favorite example of this is in white-tailed deer. Males will mate with one another, and there are these societies, these all-male societies of deer called velvet-horns that roam the forest in packs of, like, two to seven. And they don't have full-on big antlers, they have these little velvet ones. So they don't fight, and so that leaves them healthier than the other ones because they're not getting injured. And these all-male packs will take in orphaned fawns and raise them and protect them. And learning about the sheer breadth of how queerness is a part of nature, this thread that was there all along but we missed—but I missed—it changed my understanding of how I fit on the tree of life.

ELIOT SCHREFER: There can be a loneliness to being LGBT, that, in a kind of broad existence sense ...

LULU: Eliot Schrefer again.

ELIOT SCHREFER: ... that we are a blip of a strange time of human culture that created us, and that without foundation in the past and without future, that this kind of—it can feel annihilating. And I love the idea that queerness does not make us an anomaly, does not separate us from the natural world, but instead it is our heritage as animals.

LULU: I would love to end the story right here, but I can't because after a short break, I have a lesson to learn about the dangers of finding your belonging in nature.

LATIF: We'll be back.

LATIF: Latif.

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Radiolab.

LULU: Gulls.

LATIF: And where we going next?

LULU: All right, so we need to take a brief pit stop in Washington, DC, because about 30 years after George and Molly first discovered the gulls, the quote-unquote "lesbian" seagulls make an appearance at the Supreme Court.

LATIF: The gulls—the gulls did?

LULU: Kind of, yeah. So in 2003, Lawrence v. Texas, the case that will overturn the remaining bans on queer sex and legalize it for the whole country, make it a constitutional right, it's this huge victory, there was a brief that was filed that said basically you can't call homosexuality a crime against nature because look how common it is in nature. And they footnote this book, in the middle of which is a section, complete with illustrations, on the lesbian gulls.

LATIF: Wow!

LULU: And so whether or not any justice, like, opened that book and changed their mind because of that, I do love to just know that the homosexual seagulls were there that day, like, cheering from the rafters.

LATIF: Cheering from the footnotes.

LULU: Yeah, cheering from the footnotes. [squawk]

LULU: Molly, this all kind of started with your eye.

MOLLY WARNER: That's right. [laughs]

LULU: It started with you noticing something, and I think whether or not it's a big part of your life now, I know that I at least feel this odd gratitude to the grueling spring you spent out there, because in a real way, it's part of why I feel a deeper sense of belonging than maybe like a queer woman 50 years ago. So I guess I just kind of wanted to say thank you. [laughs]

MOLLY WARNER: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

LULU: So what I'm really hoping I can do next is actually go out to the island. I'm trying right now to get my editor to send me with my wife and our two little boys to go camp there for a night so we can, you know, collect the sounds of the gulls, and then at night be nesting down with our little brood in our little nest and picturing that there's, like, female-female pairs with their little nests. And—and just feeling, like, this oneness. [laughs]

GEORGE HUNT: But, you know, the female-female pairing died out.

LULU: Wait. What?

LATIF: What?

LULU: So there aren't—there's still seagulls but the island is hetero now. [laughs]

LATIF: How did that happen?

LULU: Well, George's theory is that back in the '70s, chemicals like DDT were getting into the birds, but for some reason were more toxic to the males.

LATIF: Huh.

LULU: Which left an island without that many males around.

GEORGE HUNT: And a female that's primed to mate will mate with the best prospect available. So they pair up with another female.

LULU: And once DDT was banned, the male population could rebound so the females didn't need to pair up anymore.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: That's his theory.

LULU: Has it been seen since on the islands that you know of?

GEORGE HUNT: Not that I know of.

LULU: Do you guess that, like, in these 30 years, 40 years, do you think sometimes it happens? Just because of ...

GEORGE HUNT: I have not seen it since.

LULU: Okay.

GEORGE HUNT: Nobody has told me they saw them. This was the early '70s.

LULU: But isn't it hard to see—isn't it hard to see with the naked eye? Sorry to interrupt, but couldn't it be happening without us realizing?

GEORGE HUNT: It could be happening without us realizing, but the eggs are big and obvious. And there are enough people walking around in gull colonies and dealing with gulls in one way or another, people would be aware of lots of eggs, especially after what we had. But no, I—I don't think it's going on now. Sorry.

LULU: [laughs] I know! I was like, as a queer person ...

GEORGE HUNT: I can hear you. "Please tell me they still like doing that!"

LULU: No, no. But I appreciate you, George Hunt, as a—as a just man wed to the facts and the observations, which is how we got here. But yeah, there's a deflation in the—like, you know, you want to—you want—you want a certain story sometimes.

GEORGE HUNT: Yes.

LULU: So to just sum that all up: it means that the animal that opened the floodgates to all the research which has helped us see the naturalness of homosexuality in nature was most likely a fluke.

LATIF: Aww!

LULU: Which honestly knocked the wind out of me. It made me feel embarrassed.

GRACE MILLER: Okay. I mean, what is your deal with these queer animals?

LULU: Okay, so quanimals ...

GRACE MILLER: Quanimals. [laughs]

LULU: This is someone very close to me. My wife Grace.

LULU: Is this the first time I've dragged you onto the microphone in 10 years of being together?

GRACE MILLER: I think yeah.

LULU: Well, welcome.

LULU: And I asked her to talk to me because the whole time I've been working on this, Grace has been side-eyeing what she calls ...

GRACE MILLER: ... this is your pathological obsession ...

LATIF: [laughs]

LULU: ... with finding queer animals.

GRACE MILLER: Like, one book after another of gay animal stories started popping up. [laughs]

LULU: In our home?

GRACE MILLER: No matter how many times I put them away, they would be back where they started. And, like, I thought it was cute at first. But then it kept going. It almost—to me, it felt like you were seeking validation of our relationship in a certain way. Almost.

LULU: Oh, whoa! Of our relationship.

GRACE MILLER: Not like our relationship specifically, but of, like, your own experience of being queer.

LULU: And though at first I kind of denied that, the more we talked ...

GRACE MILLER: I thought you said at some point that it, like, brought reassurance to you.

LULU: Yeah.

LULU: ... the more I did realize that maybe they were, like, giving me something like a—like a shield against a message that you can get as you walk through the world as a queer family.

LATIF: What do you mean?

LULU: I mean, the state next door, the Attorney General three years ago wanted to scratch me off my son's birth certificate. We each have a kid who's biological and one who's not, and for the non-biological parent, we're currently allowed to both be on the birth certificate, but anyone in the gay community knows that, like, you want to also adopt your child because you don't know where rights are going.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: And the process of adopting your own child, to have the state officially recognize each of us, you have to submit yourself to a background check, you have to submit yourself to a house visit, knowing that the presumption is you're probably not fit. You have to, like, experience looking at your floors and, like, your body and wondering, "Oh God, there's a dust bunny under this part of my kitchen. Oh, what is in my cupboards? Am I too messy today?" I mean, there's literally a coffee stain on my pants right now, and—and just that process.

LULU: Like, any braca-laca on the street it seems can go make a baby and the state's fine with it, but should it be two women or should it be two men or should there be a trans person involved, and you'd like to adopt that child, your own child, you have to prove that you're fit.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: I mean, I get that. You know when we're in public sometimes with our kids and it's like, you know, if they're misbehaving it feels worse because we're two moms and you're like, "Oh, I don't want it to reflect badly on us."

GRACE MILLER: Right.

LULU: And they're like, "See? It is bad for them." I don't know, there's just something so, like, profoundly like a fresh drink of water to just like—you know, and that's why I'm cherry-picking the studies where the homo animals have higher offspring survival rates, and where it's about, like, species—like, where I'm like, "It's good for a community! It's good for a kid!"

GRACE MILLER: Yeah. I mean, it just makes me sad that you think of it like that. It makes me sad that those laws are still contributing to you feeling gross, you know? Like, or to delegitimizing our relation ...

LULU: I mostly feel angry, FYI.

GRACE MILLER: But I think the salient feeling is disgust, or—or, like, wrongness.

LULU: Yeah, I don't know. It's like the fear that there are some people who think you would be dangerous to their kid, and I—there's a low-grade always trying to prove otherwise, yeah.

GRACE MILLER: But I feel like the discr—like, all the discriminatory practices to be taken away ...

LULU: Just because ...

GRACE MILLER: ... Not because. [laughs] Because we're, like, human beings, not because we also exist in nature. Do you know what I mean?

LULU: Yeah.

GRACE MILLER: Like, why do we need to prove our worth by existing in nature? Why not just acknowledge that, like, whatever? The relationships are—like, it's love! Like, all it is is—like, it's just loving people, and there's nothing wrong with that.

LULU: Oh my God, what time is it? Do we have to pick up our kids? Holy [bleep]! Oh my God, we gotta go! Okay, oh God, we're gonna be late. Last moms at daycare, and then they'll be like, "Lesbians don't pick up their kids on time!" She's putting on her jacket. She's leaving.

GRACE MILLER: All right, am I getting the kids or are you?

LULU: Um, one or both?

LULU: Coming up after a short break, love stays in the air, this time with America's favorite bird, the bald eagle. Stay tuned.

LULU: Tweet, tweet, caw caw! This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. Today, love is in the air. We are telling stories about love and affection and care that takes place up in the air. And for our next segment, we are going to hear a story that originally aired on Radiolab's first spinoff show for families, Terrestrials. It is a show that I host. It's all about nature and the strangeness waiting right here on Earth. And from our first season, the story that was probably the most surprising is one that happens to take place up in the air. And it's going to begin in three, two, one.

NATAANII MEANS: Imagine your skin turned to feathers.

LULU: Long, dark brown feathers.

CRYSTAL SLUSHER: Over 7,000 feathers.

LULU: And your arms stretched to over twice the size of your body, and catch the wind.

NATAANII MEANS: And you're higher than the airplanes.

LULU: You're soaring through the clouds.

NATAANII MEANS: And you're feeling the cold air go through your feathers.

LULU: And now your eyes bulge to bigger than your brain, letting you see tiny things from miles away.

NATAANII MEANS: If a rabbit's running along the shoreline, you can see that rabbit.

LULU: Suddenly, a dark spot in the blue lake beneath you catches your eye and you start dive bombing down, down.

NATAANII MEANS: And you drag your wings along the water of the lake.

LULU: Your feet curl and grow talons. And you—fwoop!—catch a fish, which you then devour with your ...

ED BRITTON: Very sharp beak.

LULU: On your very white head.

ED BRITTON: You are a bald eagle now!

NATAANII MEANS: In our language, we say "wambli."

LULU: That's right! America's national symbol. You'll find it on quarters and dollar bills and presidential flags and military insignias. This glowering bird of prey with an intimidating brow bone, razor-sharp beak and terrifying talons meant to convey to the world a ferocious fight to the death: independence.

LULU: But today we've got a story about a man who looked up into the trees and saw something that suggests we may have this big birdie kind of wrong.

ED BRITTON: Yeah! Well, glad to connect! [laughs]

LULU: This is our guy in question, Ed.

ED BRITTON: Ed Britton.

LULU: He is a wildlife biologist who works for the government, helping to protect a stretch of forest alongside the Mississippi River in Illinois. And one chilly day in January of 2013, Ed looks up into the trees and sees something …

ED BRITTON: Strange!

LULU: It looks like there are three bald eagles sitting together near one nest.

ED BRITTON: Yes.

LULU: And to Ed's eye, it appears to be one female and ...

ED BRITTON: Two males.

LULU: But he thought there was no way that could be, because everything he'd learned in his scientific training said that if you were to put two males nearby each other ...

ED BRITTON: There's gonna be trouble.

LULU: They were said to squawk and claw so viciously, it sometimes resulted in death.

ED BRITTON: That's how territorial they are.

LULU: Wow!

LULU: And this reputation for do-or-die aggression is one of the main reasons the Founding Fathers chose the bald eagle as America's national symbol, back in 1782.

NATAANII MEANS: I think maybe the first Europeans that came here seen the power of eagles.

LULU: That's Nataanii Means, a hip-hop artist who's Indigenous—native to this land. And he says that his ancestors from the Oglala Lakota and Diné tribes had admired the bald eagle long before the Founding Fathers showed up.

NATAANII MEANS: The eagle, to us, is very sacred.

LULU: Though for slightly different reasons.

NATAANII MEANS: It's the highest in the sky. It's the closest to Creator.

LULU: It was seen as a messenger between worlds, and a healer.

NATAANII MEANS: We carried eagle feathers that can help in healing ceremonies. They take a lot of our illnesses away.

LULU: Now the Founding Fathers weren't as focused on the potential healing in the feathers as they were in the potential fight in the talons. So they began carving images of the bird on swords and battleships to warn the world that they were not afraid to fight to the death to protect their newly-claimed territory.

ED BRITTON: So they were up in a tree about 100 feet high.

LULU: So back to Ed, squinting up at what seemed to be two male bald eagles and a female cozying up together, he just couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

ED BRITTON: It's so difficult because that nest is so high up.

LULU: And then the nesting season ends, the birds fly away, and he figures that's probably it.

ED BRITTON: Mm-hmm.

LULU: Except the next year, he swears he sees the trio again. And the next year?

ED BRITTON: Again!

LULU: Now people didn't always believe Ed when he told them what he was seeing. But then, in 2016, this trio of bald eagles happened to flutter down and begin nesting in a tree that was next to a webcam.

NELL: I just thought that cam was so unique!

LULU: This is Nell, a webcam watcher from Jacksonville, Florida.

NELL: You know, because eagles don't usually—three's company.

LULU: [laughs]

LULU: And in an instant, there was no more doubt. The three ferocious birds of prey were living peacefully as a trio!

CHRISTINE: I think people were just coming together over that fact that it was something different.

LULU: Another cam watcher, Christine from New Hampshire.

CHRISTINE: It was great to be able to look in on it and say, "Wow, what the heck's going on now?" You know?

LULU: It was quickly confirmed that it was indeed two males and a female.

ED BRITTON: The female's bigger.

LULU: Huh!

ED BRITTON: You know, she's several pounds bigger. I call her the Boss. [laughs]

LULU: Webcam viewers named her ...

NELL: Hope.

LULU: And they named the males ...

ED BRITTON: Valor One.

LULU: And ...

ED BRITTON: Valor Two.

LULU: "Valor" meaning, like, courage?

ED BRITTON: Yes. Uh-huh.

LULU: How do you tell the males apart?

ED BRITTON: You know, we don't like to body shame them, but they call Valor One "Skinny Legs."

LULU: [laughs] Okay. Does Valor Two have any look?

ED BRITTON: He has a dark spot in his eye, and it's very unique.

LULU: Ooh!

LULU: Thousands of people started tuning in ...

NELL: I had them on my computer from the time I turned the computer on to the time I turned the computer off.

LULU: ... watching in crystal-clear detail this thing that scientists—and patriots—thought could never happen.

LULU: I mean, did you ever see it where all three of them were, like, snuggled into the nest together at the same time?

ED BRITTON: Oh, yes. Yes, absolutely.

LULU: Yeah?

ED BRITTON: Oh yes. Yep.

LULU: Wow!

LULU: By day they took turns tidying the nest, bringing one another food.

ED BRITTON: Mostly fish, but we also saw ducks.

LULU: Whole ducks?

ED BRITTON: Yup! We saw parts of deer.

LULU: Hmm!

LULU: And after many cold winter nights keeping each other warm in that nest, come February, three white eggs appeared—doot doot doot. And a few weeks later, —crack, crack, crack—three baby eaglets!

CHRISTINE: You know, they were so tiny. Oh my—and so adorable!

ED BRITTON: Yes, indeed! [laughs]

LULU: And as biologist Ed watches these three parents caring for their babies ...

ED BRITTON: They were the happiest family.

LULU: ... he starts thinking about why this unusual trio actually makes sense. Because see, Hope had been trying to make a family for years before she linked up with the two daddies. And this is a little sad, but she had a hard time. Her babies sometimes got cold or fell out of the nest when she was away hunting, and they didn't always make it.

ED BRITTON: Yeah. It was awfully sad.

LULU: And those losses were huge, because bald eagles had been endangered—almost extinct—so every birth mattered.

ED BRITTON: Where I grew up in southern Illinois, we never saw bald eagles. That was back in the '40s and the '50s. I'm—I'm elderly. [laughs]

LULU: Humans had almost wiped out bald eagles from hunting them, cutting down their forests, using chemicals. But as Ed grew up, he was a part of the group of people who tried everything they could think of to save bald eagles: they protected forests and banned hunting of bald eagles, and stopped using chemicals that harmed them. But, looking up at the trees, he realized it was like this trio of eagles had come up with a brilliant technique all of their own.

CHRISTINE: To be able to witness it, that's the miracle. You know, it doesn't have to be a traditional family for it to work!

LULU: And by June, as the forest turned soft with green leaves, one by one, each of the three eaglets, with newly lanky wings, tested the air and leapt away. Year after year, those three parents stay together, fledging more and more eaglets, and in the process challenging scientists' notions about what a natural family looks like. Until one cold evening in March, Hope screams out.

NELL: Eagles, when they alert, they have a certain call to one another.

LULU: That's webcam watcher Nell again.

NELL: I saw Hope looking up into the sky, and you could see she was tracking. And then she started doing her alert call to her partners to come, you know—to come see what's going on.

LULU: And what's going on is that two stranger eagles were dive bombing the nest, attacking Hope and her two newest babies.

ED BRITTON: Our phone lines light up.

LULU: With people saying ...

ED BRITTON: "Oh my gosh, something terrible has just happened! You've gotta get out there and do something."

LULU: Ed flips on his live feed of the cam and sees ...

ED BRITTON: A very large bird, which we believed to be a female, was on the back of Hope.

LULU: Her talons were digging into Hope's shoulders.

CHRISTINE: There's no dads on the nest.

LULU: The dads are both down on the ground, fighting off the other invading eagle.

CHRISTINE: The two babies, they didn't look good.

LULU: They looked scared of this huge eagle attacking their mom.

NELL: I wanted to reach through the computer monitor and grab that other eagle, is what I wanted to do.

ED BRITTON: And they struggled for over an hour.

NELL: The last thing I saw was Hope and her going off the nest. They just—they basically dragged one another off one side of the nest and went down to the ground.

LULU: Ed and his team rush out into the forest to search around on the ground for Hope. But meanwhile, up in that nest, those babies are all alone.

CHRISTINE: It looked like they hadn't been fed for a while. They were ragged, they were weak.

LULU: And then suddenly—doo doo doo doo!

NELL: I saw the dads taking over, Valor One and Valor Two, like little troopers!

LULU: The dads fly back up into the nest to defend their babies.

CHRISTINE: It was such a relief that they were there.

LULU: But right on their tails are the two invading eagles. They return and they keep attacking.

ED BRITTON: They wanted to kill everything up there and take the nest over.

LULU: The sun rises, and the attackers keep at it for days, weeks! But those dads?

CHRISTINE: They just defended that nest with their lives, not caring what happened to them, but caring for those little baby eaglets.

LULU: Oh!

ED BRITTON: And the two dads, Valor One and Valor Two, valiantly, very valiantly, fought off this pair of eagles.

LULU: Wow!

ED BRITTON: And after about three weeks, the attacks finally ended.

LULU: Hope was never seen again. Nobody's sure exactly what happened to her, but those two dads stayed with their babies. As the air grew warm, as yellow and purple flowers began poking their way up through the dirt, and kids began fishing on the Mississippi River, the dads kept watch over their chicks, bringing them food and keeping them warm at night. Until finally, come June ...

ED BRITTON: The two chicks ended up growing and leaving the nest. It was extremely happy. Yes, indeed. We gave them the Greatest Dads Award of the Year.

LULU: Ed says he was totally shocked by how things unfolded, by how caring and collaborative the two dads were together.

ED BRITTON: And this is just one incredible survival story that I would've never fathomed in my career.

NATAANII MEANS: There's a lot that people don't know about eagles.

LULU: This is Nataanii again.

NATAANII MEANS: They're very compassionate.

LULU: And what Ed learned from watching the trio, Nataanii learned from his family and culture.

NATAANII MEANS: The first time I saw an eagle, he was huge, man. Huge! I went home and I told my dad, you know, "Hey, I seen an eagle today." And then he sat me down and he said, "When an eagle chooses a mate, they're together for life. They're always taking care of the family."

LULU: It was then that Nataanii first learned about the bald eagle's softer side, how the creature isn't only about fighting.

NATAANII MEANS: But it's also a symbol of love and relationship.

LULU: And that's why in the Lakota Tradition, you can earn a bald eagle feather if you do something particularly caring.

NATAANII MEANS: Just anything. Anything you do that's selfless and not for yourself, but for the people, so that people may live.

LULU: Nataanii gets some eagle feathers out that he got from different ceremonies, and begins brushing them over his face.

NATAANII MEANS: [laughs] Feels good. Gives me chills.

LULU: And he tells me about a really bad day a few years back when he just felt lonely, like no one cared about him.

NATAANII MEANS: I was sitting right here in this spot. There was a bunch of eagle feathers sitting right here. I was like, "I got eagle feathers protecting me. These eagle feathers, protecting me, protecting ..."

LULU: A song started coming to him.

NATAANII MEANS: So then I just started writing, and it just came out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nataanii Means: Yeah, I got these eagle feathers protecting me. I got these eagle feathers ...]

LULU: He said that when he thinks about how these creatures behave in myths and the wild ...

NATAANII MEANS: When I fan myself off—when I—when I bring these over my face, you know, it's like I feel a connection to these birds. And this might sound funny, it might sound off, but I feel a connection to my ancestors. I do! Like, I don't have to be lost because I feel love.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nataanii Means: I got these eagle feathers protecting me. Yeah, I got these eagle feathers ...]

LULU: When I tell him the story of how caring those dads in the trio were observed to be, he's not surprised.

NATAANII MEANS: Oh no, yeah. Science—science is catching up to Indigenous philosophies for sure. [laughs]

LULU: Now as for the end of our eagle story, when a trio loses one of its members, that's it for the trio, right?

ED BRITTON: Oh no! No. [laughs]

LULU: Because it turned out that the next fall, the two dads returned with a new female!

ED BRITTON: And we—we were just going, "How did you do that?"

LULU: [laughs] So if I went right now, like, could I—could I peek?

ED BRITTON: You sure could. Yup.

LULU: I pull up the live feed of the nest.

LULU: So I'm looking at it right now. So I see this—it's winter, so it's a tree without leaves. And there are all these ...

LULU: And some four years later, that new trio is still together. As Ed and I talked, we could see them up there in the nest together.

LULU: And I see the white head and the yellow beak of an eagle.

ED BRITTON: She—she's just laying eggs.

LULU: Wow!

LULU: All told, the two dads have lived together in a trio for about a decade, fledged about 20 eaglets, and been a part of the story that—along with some human help—brought the number of bald eagles back from near-extinction and got them off the endangered species list.

ED BRITTON: [laughs] Yeah. I look at this as probably one of the greatest wildlife success stories that we've ever had in the United States.

LULU: And it turns out that is not the only trio of bald eagles that has been observed in the wild. In recent history there have been at least nine trios documented in nature. And increasingly, scientists are beginning to think quote-unquote 'cooperative nesting,' is not nearly as uncommon as they thought.

ED BRITTON: I think we'd probably be amazed if we really knew all of the unique things that happened with wildlife, because we just don't know the secrets in their life.

LULU: Ed says this whole experience really flipped his understanding of bald eagles. Helped him to see that in a certain way, he had been blinded by the eagle on the quarter, blinded by the story of the bird as a ferocious and independent being.

LULU: Would you ever call what—what's happening between these birds "love?"

ED BRITTON: Absolutely. Absolutely.

LULU: Oh, you would?

ED BRITTON: Oh, absolutely.

LULU: You would?

ED BRITTON: Yes, indeed.

LULU: You don't shy away from that—that word?

ED BRITTON: Not whatsoever.

LULU: Between animals?

ED BRITTON: No. No. It's family bonding, and that happens. You know, love is family. I see nothing wrong with saying "loving animals."

LULU: All right. Thanks so much, Ed.

LULU: Oh no. Songbud's got a mohawk and an electric guitar.

[ALAN: [singing] I wanna hear the eagle! Now multiply that by three-gle! Yeah, I wanna hear the eagle! Now I wanna hear all three-gle!]

[ALAN: [singing] I know it's not only me-gle. I'm sure you agree-gle. Would be awesome to see-gle. All of them up in a tree-gle, or in the sky flying free-gle. So I'm down on my knee-gle.]

[ALAN: [singing] I'm begging and plea-gle. I wanna hear the eagles. Not a hunting beagle. Not a manatee-gle. Yeah, I wanna hear the eagles!]

[ALAN: [singing] I wanna hear the eagle! Now multiply that by three-gle! I wanna hear the eagle! Now I wanna hear all three-gle!]

LULU: Alan Goffinski, everyone! Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. It is produced by the very talon-ted—like talons? Talons? Ana González and Alan Goffinski and me. If you liked what you heard there, there are many more episodes waiting for you to discover about various other animals. Just head on over to TerrestrialsPodcast.org or subscribe to Terrestrials wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. We'll catch you next week.

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