THE LIFE AND HABITS OF PENGUINS. 251 



had been unavailing to encharm a mate running about the rookery in a forlorn and 

 battered state, pecked at by every bird it passes, and only too glad to escape to safety 

 beyond the rookery. Penguins fight almost solely with their beaks, dealing an 

 occasional blow with their flippers. But such blows in the case of an Emperor Penguin 

 are most powerful. A harsh cry accompanies every peck the penguin gives his enemy, 

 so that it is easy to imagine that with courtship and fighting a rookery is anything but 

 quiet. Wherever penguins nest, except in the very bad weather, there is an incessant 

 cackle that requires only a few hundred birds to become deafening at times. The nest 

 does not take long to complete, for it is merely a small heap of stones a few inches 

 high, scooped out in the middle into a slight hollow. 



Towards the end of October, at the South Orkneys, the eggs of the Adelia Penguins 

 were laid. As a rule there are two in each nest, but occasionally three. The pug- 

 naciousness of the birds then increases, and they show much courage in defending 

 their eggs, and later their chicks, from the attacks of enemies. The skua (Megalestris 

 antarctica) is the bird for which the penguins must always be on their guard. As 

 soon as the eggs are laid skuas hover continually over the rookeries, and if one spies 

 an unguarded egg it swoops down immediately, seizes the egg, and carries it off to a 

 distance in order to suck the contents. On a skua flying low over the rookery all the 

 penguins in the vicinity combine in a shrill uproar in the hope of scaring it away, but 

 seldom with much success, and scores of eggs are thus destroyed during incubation. So 

 great, in fact, is the harvest of the skuas, that for a few weeks these birds congregate 

 near the rookeries and live on little else than eggs of penguins. 



The presence of the Expedition introduced the penguins to a new and more per- 

 sistent enemy. Thousands of eggs were collected for food. This presented no 

 difficulty : the birds were simply pushed off the nests and the eggs picked up. But 

 the Adelia Penguin did not submit to this robbery without a protest. It would 

 rush at the intruder and bite him savagely, sometimes even jumping up and trying to 

 bite his arm. The bite of an angry penguin is not soon forgotten, so it was well to be 

 protected with long leather sea-boots. Occasionally a robbed bird would follow a man 

 several yards, attacking him courageously all the time, but generally they stayed near 

 the plundered nest and bewailed their lot. In most cases another couple of eggs 

 were laid very soon. 



Two weeks after the Adelias had begun to lay, the first Gentoo Penguin's egg was 

 obtained. The Gentoos, who had been a fortnight later in arriving, inhabited the same 

 rookeries as the Adelias, but owing to their coming later had to be content with the 

 more outlying or otherwise less favourable sites. They had a small rookery of their 

 own on the west side of Scotia Bay, less than a mile from the ship. This afforded 

 excellent opportunities for the collection of dated eggs for embryological study. The 

 (ientoos are much more timid than the Adelias, and seldom made a stand when we 

 approached their nests, but bolted in a body, leaving their eggs at our mercy. This 



certainly facilitated our work, if it lessened the interest and excitement. Scarcely ever 

 VOL. IV. 



