228 
teasing, the poor dazed victim would 
still persist in scampering away from 
the water. I often found that the 
surest way to keep penguins ashore was 
to try to drive them into the sea. 
The antiquity of the hill-climbing 
instinct among the Johnny penguins is 
finally attested by a strange and roman- 
tic phenomenon, namely that the pen- 
guins go back to the seclusion of the 
heights to die. In a hollow at the 
summit of the coast range south of the 
Bay of Isles lies a clear lake on a bed of 
ice-cracked stones. This transparent 
pool, formed entirely of snow-water, 
with a maximum depth of twelve or 
fifteen feet, is a penguin graveyard. 
In January, 1913, I found its bottom 
thickly strewn with the bodies of pen- 
guins which had outlived the perils of 
the sea and had apparently accomplished 
the rare feat among wild animals of 
dying a natural death. They lay by 
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
scores all over the stony bed of the pool, 
mostly on their backs, with pinions out- 
stretched, their breasts reflecting gleams 
of white from the deeper water. Safe 
from their two enemies, the sea-leopard 
in the ocean and the skua gull ashore, 
they took their last rest. For months, 
perhaps years, they would undergo no 
bodily change in their frigid graves. 
Nesting Johnnies are generally timid, 
scampering off at the approach of a man, 
but never retreating more than a few 
paces. A small proportion of them 
stand their ground on the nests and show 
fight, employing as weapons both bill 
and wings. With the latter they can 
strike rapid and forceful blows. On one 
occasion a bird which I had roused from 
sleep attacked me and beat such a 
furious tattoo upon my leather leggings 
that its own pinions were soon bleeding. 
When a brooding penguin is driven away 
from young nestlings it lingers near by, 
An adult Johnny with the first chick. Three or four days usually intervene between the hatching 
of the two eggs. 
the head 
Note the penguin’s long tail pointing stiffly upward, and the white fillet which crosses 
