The humble goose is not one to be trifled with. They brawl with pedestrians, chase off soldiers, and defeat gorillas in single combat. They stone-cold stare down oncoming traffic without flinching. But they also love as hard as they fight, with a penchant for bi throuples. No gander typified these goosely qualities more than Thomas the Goose.
Thomas was a domestic white goose who first made a name for himself in the early 1990s in New Zealand’s Waimanu lagoon, where he bonded with a black swan named Henrietta. The couple spent a remarkable 18 to 24 years together (accounts vary), during which the two were inseparable. Anyone who tried to get too close to Henrietta, be they human or dog, would have Thomas’s wrath to contend with. But then a female swan joined the pair to form a love triangle, and shortly thereafter laid an egg. Only, the cygnet that hatched from it wasn’t a swoose (a swan-goose mix). It was a full swan. Henrietta was actually a male (renamed Henry), and everything the local tour guides and bird watchers thought they knew about Thomas was turned upside down. For nearly a quarter century, Thomas was in a same-sex bond.
While Thomas was combative to the newcomer at first, once the eggs were hatched, he helped raise the offspring as his own — all 68 of them over six years, often doing a more attentive job at parenting than the swans themselves.
Eventually, Henry died of old age in 2009, and the female swan, confusingly named Henrietta, went her own way. But after some time spent figuratively flying solo (domestic geese are flightless), Thomas met a female goose and the pair had 10 goslings of their own. But Thomas was getting on in years.
After his eyesight failed, Thomas was moved to the Wellington Bird Rehabilitation Trust in 2013, where he lived until he died in 2018 at nearly 40 years old, an incredibly advanced age for a goose.
By the time he died, Thomas was a world-famous blind bi goose. His death was covered by the BBC. His funeral — complete with a full procession and bagpipe player — was attended by about 60 people, and he was buried next to Henry. If that weren’t extraordinary enough, the actor, playwright, and author Pinky Agnew inscribed a surprisingly moving original epitaph on Thomas’s tombstone.
But as sensational as Thomas was, he was far from an anomaly. Bisexuality is, in fact, quite common among birds.
In the 1999 book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, the biologist Bruce Bagemihl catalogued hundreds of studies showing that more than 130 bird species engage in same-sex behavior. Another study from 2006 in Behavioral Ecology took a look at 80 bird species and found documented same-sex behavior in every single one. In 31 of them, the behavior wasn’t rare, either. The study found that same-sex activity was more common among males, and that group mating with three or more partners was even more common. We also know from broader animal research that strict homosexuality occurs almost nowhere in nature. Given this, the data we have on bird behavior provides a bird’s-eye view of what we saw with Thomas individually (or other famous cases like Silo the Penguin): bisexuality.
The authors of the Behavioral Ecology study believe that bisexual behavior helps birds form social alliances and allows for greater sharing of resources, especially considering that it overlaps with relationships of three or more partners (similar to what we’d call polyamory in humans). This makes perfect sense from the point of view of nature. Just look at Thomas’s story. He helped raise nearly 70 offspring from his partners, providing more care than two parents alone can give and then went on to father 10 more of his own. Evolutionarily speaking, that’s like hitting a lottery jackpot. After all, there’s a reason birds of a feather flock together: there’s strength in numbers.