A pair of courting birds standing on a shoal overlooking the sea 
THE PENGUINS OF SOUTH GEORGIA 
“ JOHNNIES” AND ‘‘KINGS” ON A DESOLATE SUBANTARCTIC ISLAND ! 
By Robert Cushman Murphy 
UITE unlike the Johnny Penguin 
is its big neighbor, the king 
penguin. This species was 
once abundant at South 
Georgia, but it is now obviously in dan- 
ger of extinction, partly because of the 
foraging raids of sealers and whalers, 
partly from the ravages of traders in 
penguin oil. 
We discovered three king penguin 
colonies, all in the neighborhood of 
Johnny penguin rookeries, but all on 
low ground. The largest of these was 
situated south of the Bay of Isles among 
a barren waste of morainic stones. A 
great bank of unmelting névé bounded 
the settlement on the west, while a 
violent glacial torrent separated it from 
the sloping edge of a glacier on the east. 
In such a gulch, between walls of snow 
and ice, swept by southerly gales that 
1 Continued from the last issue of the Journat. 
Illustrations from photographs by the Author. 
descended through a rift in the moun- 
tains, a band of about three hundred and 
fifty king penguins made their home. 
When we found the colony, on Decem- 
ber 16, many of the kings were incubat- 
ing eggs, while at the same time half a 
dozen young of the previous year, fully 
grown but with ragged patches of long 
down still attached to their contour 
feathers, were associating with free 
adult birds. The sitters stretched up 
to as great a height as possible at the 
approach of their first human visitors 
(at least during that season), and clung 
tenaciously to their eggs. After the 
members of our crew had gathered many 
eggs and had placed them in one spot 
on the ground, the robbed penguins 
approached the pile and slyly appro- 
priated eggs to replace the lost ones. 
But not only did they attempt to take 
one egg—the proper complement — 
several tried to tuck two in the space 
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