104 INACCESSIBLE ISLAND. 



and open ready to bite, yelling savagely " caa, caa, urr, urr," 

 its red eye gleaming and its plumes at half-cock, and quivering 

 with rage. No sooner are your legs within reach than they 

 are furiously bitten, often by two or three birds at once : that 

 is, if you have not got on strong leather gaiters, as on the first 

 occasion of visiting a rookery you probably have not. 



At first you try to avoid the nests, but soon find that 

 impossible ; then maddened almost, by the pain, stench and 

 noise, you have recourse to brutality. Thump, thump, goes 

 your stick, and at each blow down goes a bird Thud, thud, 

 you hear from the men behind as they kick the birds right and 

 left off the nests, and so you go on for a bit, thump and smash, 

 whack, thud, " caa, caa, urr, urr," and the path behind you is 

 strewed with the dead and dying and bleeding. 



But you make miserably slow progress, and, worried to 

 death, at last resort to the expedient of stampeding as far as 

 your breath will carry you. You put down your head and 

 make a rush through the grass, treading on old and young 

 haphazard, and rushing on before they have time to bite. 



The air is close in the rookery, and the sun hot above, and 

 out of breath, and running with perspiration, you come across 

 a mass of rock fallen from the cliff above, and sticking up in 

 the rookery ; this you hail as " a city of refuge." You hammer 

 off it hurriedly half a dozen penguins who are sunning them- 

 selves there, and are on the look-out, and mounting on the top 

 take out )our handkerchief to wipe away the perspiration and 

 rest a while, and see in which direction you have been going, 

 how far you have got, and in which direction you are to make 

 the next plunge. Then, when you are refreshed, you make 

 another rush, and so on. 



If you stand quite still, so long as your foot is not actually 

 on the top of a nest of eggs or young, the penguins soon cease 

 biting at you and yelling. I always adopted the stampede 

 method in rookeries, but the men usually preferred to have 

 their revenge and fought their way every foot. 



Of course it is horribly cruel thus to kill whole families of 

 innocent birds, but it is absolutely necessary. One must cross 

 the rookeries in order to explore the island at all, and collect 

 the plants, or survey the coast from the heights. 



These penguins make a nest which is simply a shallow 

 depression in the black dirt scantily lined with a few bits of 

 grass, or not lined at all. They lay two greenish white eggs 

 about as big as duck eggs, and both male and female incubate. 



After passing through the rookery, we entered one of the 

 small coppices 1 have already described. Hopping and fluttering 

 about amongst the trees and herbage were abundance of a 



