They mate for life, they dance for years to get there, and at least thirty percent of them are female-female pairs. Hannah + Cleo celebrate Pride Month with the Laysan albatross! The seabird that quietly dismantled assumptions about pair bonding, raising chicks together, and currently adapting to survive in our inhospitable oceans. Lindsay Young's 2008 discovery at Kaena Point changed the game.

28:48 Albatross conversation starts

Music by fknsyd

Sources

All About Birds / Cornell Lab of Ornithology — Laysan Albatross

Discover Wildlife (Lucy Cooke) — "Hawaii's Lesbian Albatrosses"

National Geographic (Carl Zimmer) — "Same-Sex Mothers: Letting Albatrosses Be Albatrosses" / Young & VanderWerf, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 2013

Wikipedia — Albatross (metaphor), Laysan Albatross, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Audubon Society — field guide, courtship, Wisdom

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — Midway Atoll NWR, Wisdom updates

Earth Sky — Wisdom 2025–2026 season

Oceana — conservation profile

Taylor Swift — The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (2024)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

Seafood watch “app”

Ecobricking Info