Penguin buddies to part as pairing put on endangered list

BEING an endangered species, it has always been difficult for African penguins to p-p-pick up a partner.

But for Buddy and Pedro, finding a female was never their passion.

The happy bachelors had happily settled down together for the past year, spurning the advances of the fairer sex and instead sharing the nest they built together in Toronto Zoo.

In spite of their curator insisting the pair share a “social bond” which was not necessarily sexual, the penguins’ affection for each other had attracted international attention with headlines and jokes abounding about “Brokeback Iceberg”.

However, much like their species, the pair’s living arrangements will no longer fly with their keepers. Zoo officials plan to separate them so they can mate with females.

Tom Mason, the zoo’s curator of birds and invertebrates, said: “The [zoo’s] two girls have been following them, we just have to get the boys interested in looking at them.”

It may be that Buddy, who is 21, has had his heart broken one too many times to let himself fall back into the wings of a female. He had a female partner for 10 years but the liaison did not produce offspring before she died. Pedro, 10, has no such baggage.

A generation ago, there were an estimated 225,000 African penguins in the wild. Now their population is 60,000 and shrinking. The birds in captivity are therefore routinely paired off in the hopes of fruitful unions.