Emperor Penguins 



Penguins caricature human beings in their upright pose, shortsightedness, curiosity, 

 apparent pompous dignity, and the Hke. They have been compared to Uttle gentlemen 

 in evening clothes. A near-sighted evangelist preaching to and trying to convert a 

 penguin colony even furnished the plot for a satire. 



There is a certain superficial resemblance between penguins and the auks of north- 

 ern waters. Both are sea birds, which on land sit upright, and many have white lower 

 parts and dark upper parts. However, they are but distantly related. Penguin anatomy 

 is so different from that of all other birds, in bone and muscle, that it has even been 

 thought that penguins evolved from a different reptilian stock than have other birds. 

 This is probably not true, but be that as it may, penguins are very different from auks. 

 The most obvious difference is that auks and their relatives (auklets, murres, murrelets, 

 guillemots, etc.) have normal bird wings, with good flight feathers, and all fly well, 

 with a direct buzzing flight (though the extinct great auk was flightless). On the other 

 hand, penguins have their wings completely modified into swimming organs or flippers 

 and the feathers are scale-like. Auks are all residents of northern waters; penguins are 

 characteristically southern, though one species lives as far north as the equator, in the 

 Galapagos Islands. Even this species is directly related to the continuous population of 

 penguins in the cold waters bordering the west coast of South America. 



The penguins in this exhibit were brought back alive by the Second Byrd Expedition 

 (1935) for the Chicago Zoological Society. They were the first of this species to come 

 alive to this country, Ijut as the result of a lung infection they survived only a few 

 months. The Byrd Expedition's headquarters was on the floating shelf ice of the Ross 

 Barrier in the Bay of Whales, where the ocean encroaches farthest toward the pole. 

 The base camp was at 78° 34' S. Lat. and 163° 56' W. Long, (the south pole being 

 at 90° S. Lat.). 



Emperor penguins did not nest at the Ross Barrier but were only summer visitors; 

 indeed, all the eight species of birds recorded were summer visitors. One must re- 

 member that the seasons are reversed in the south and the ornithologists of the expedi- 

 tion, Siple and Lindsey, report that the sun, after four months below the horizon, 

 heralded the approach of spring by reappearing on August 22. The first spring mi- 

 grants were Antarctic and snow petrels, arriving in October; later came the silver 

 gray and Wilson's petrels, the giant fulmar, the skua, and the Adelie and emperor 

 penguins. The last bird seen in the autumn was the snow petrel, on March 13, after 

 which no birds of any kind were seen in the Bay of Whales until the following spring. 



Although only eight species of birds were seen, two were in considerable numbers, 

 notably the snow petrel, thousands of which were congregating on the ice in mid- 

 summer, and the Antarctic petrel, in flocks of hundreds, "wheeling in unison above the 

 great tabular bergs." 



[941 



