It may be a bit weird and pathetic to have to celebrate news stories about animals that don’t conform to a March of the Penguins anthropomorphic nuclear family narrative. But as long as people claim that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’ it will be an occasional necessity.

It began with a love triangle between two female royal albatrosses and a wannabe male suitor. But girl power prevailed and the ladies dumped their man and set up a same-sex family together at the world’s only mainland albatross breeding colony in New Zealand.

Last week the female seabirds successfully incubated a chick in their all-girl household in the Royal Albatross Colony on South Island, which was hailed by Prince Charles when he visited in 2005 for its successful breeding programme for the rare and endangered birds.

Same-sex pairing is not unusual among the seabirds – the New Zealand breeding colony has had three female pairings over the past 70 years, and at a colony in Hawaii almost a third of chick-raising pairs of laysan albatrosses have been found to be all-female.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7011851.ece