Same-Sex Penguin Moms “Thelma and Louise” Celebrate World Penguin Day

Yesterday was World Penguin Day, and a pair of same-sex penguin moms and their foster chick in New Zealand were among the stars. 

The king penguin pair, both 24 years old, have been together for five years and reside at Auckland’s Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium. They were given an egg to incubate after another female laid a fertile egg but did not have a mate this season. “To reduce the stress on the single mother our Penguin Keepers  transferred the egg to the couple to incubate,” the aquarium said. The chick was born February 26. The moms “are very fair in their approach to parenthood and both share the parenting load as a team.”

They add, “King penguins require a bond rather than a more traditional male/female relationship during their breeding season and the same sex pairing has no impact on the raising of young.”

Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life is working with Tourism New Zealand on a campaign that “celebrates New Zealand as the number one destination to see and experience penguins,” and Thelma and Louise are their headline couple. Let’s hope their happy life together belies the fate of their movie counterparts.

Same-sex penguin pairs rose to fame after the publication of And Tango Makes Three, the charming book by real-life gay dads Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson (and illustrated by Henry Cole) about a pair of male chinstrap penguins who hatched an egg and raised a chick in New York’s Central Park Zoo—but they’re far from the only same-sex penguin parents or couples.

If you need more same-sex penguins in your life, check out the $1.95 audio book of Tango read by actor (and gay dad) Neil Patrick Harris.

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