THE LIFE-HISTORY OF BIRDS 289 



fast enough to insist on being fed, again and again ran off 

 pursuing with the rest. Again and again it stumbled and fell, 

 persistently whining out its hunger in a shrill and melancholy 

 pipe, till at last the race was given up. Forced thus by sheer 

 exhaustion to stop and rest, it had no chance of getting food. 

 Each hurrying parent with its little following of hungry chicks, 

 intent on one thing only, rushed quickly by, and the starveling 

 dropped behind to gather strength for one more effort. Again 

 it fails, a robuster bird has forced the pace, and again success 

 is wanting to the runt. Sleepily it stands there with half-shut 

 eyes, in a torpor resulting from exhaustion, cold and hunger 

 ... a dirty dishevelled dot, in the race for life a failure, de- 

 serted by its parents, who have hunted vainly for their own 

 offspring round the nest in which they hatched it, but from 

 which it may now have wandered half a mile. And so it 

 stands, lost to everything around, till a Skua in its beat drops 

 down beside it, and with a few strong vicious pecks puts an end 

 to the failing life. 



" Not once or twice, but a thousand times this happens, and 

 the kindness of Nature's seeming cruelty is borne in upon us as we 

 watched its working. All round the rookery are Skuas' nests 

 with their young; the conditions of life are hard, and failures 

 must be many where the standard of efficiency is high. Not 

 50 per cent, of the Skuas themselves survive their infancy ; 

 not 30 per cent, of Emperor Penguin chicks survive ; and from 

 the corpse-strewn condition of the acres occupied by an Adelie 

 Penguin rookery . . . mangled chicken remains by the many 

 hundred lie trodden into frozen dust and muddy guano . . . 

 [showing that] even in these communities the death-rate is 

 excessive." And " it is not only the youngest chickens that 

 die, but ... a very large proportion are birds which have 

 already shed their down and have assumed the plumage which 

 enables them to take to the water. Why, one wonders, did 

 these birds die on shore? The parents left them, true, but 

 they were ready to be left, and yet apparently they never dared 

 the water, where alone they could escape starvation. Once 

 again the uncompromising character of Nature's laws was 

 brought home to us as we realised that death was the one 

 alternative to a creature that refused to learn." 



But dozens of such instances might be quoted, some others 



19 



