ADELIE PENGUINS 



season distinctly peaceful. Others, however, pre- 

 sented a less respectable appearance. There was 

 one in particular, close to our hut, which could 

 only be described as a slum of the meanest de- 

 scription. All through the season there was more 

 fighting in this colony than anywhere else, and 

 so remarkable was this, that we christened the 

 locality " Casey's Court " and the name stuck 

 for the rest of the year. 



The nests had fewer stones than elsewhere, 

 and were more untidily made, and when the eggs 

 came, owing to the constant fighting that went on, 

 most of them got spilt from the nests or broken, 

 and very few chicks were hatched in consequence, 

 the mortality among them also being so great that 

 of the whole colony of some hundred nests, I 

 do not think more than forty or fifty chicks at 

 most reached maturity. The explanation of this 

 state of things lay, I believe, in the fact that 

 our hut and its curtilage deflected the stream 

 of penguins on their way past the spot from the 

 water to the back of the rookery, so that a constant 

 stream of them passed through " Casey's Court," 

 upsetting the tempers of the inhabitants so that 

 they became disorderly. In addition to this, there 

 was a fairly big thaw pool and much miry ground 

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