i9"l THE PENGUIN'S EGGS 27 



incubate a rounded lump of ice instead, just as before we noticed 

 them incubate a dead and frozen chick, if they were unable to 

 secure a living one. Both Bowers and I, in the failing light, mis- 

 took these rounded dirty lumps of ice for eggs, and picked them 

 up as eggs before we realised what they were. One of them I dis- 

 tinctly saw dropped by a bird, and it was roughly egg-shaped and 

 of the right size hard, dirty and semi-translucent ice. Another 

 was, as I thought, a deformed egg, and as such I picked it up. 

 It was shaped thus : 



Ice ' nest-egg ' mistaken for a deformed egg. 



I also saw one of the birds return and tuck one of these ice ' nest- 

 eggs ' on to its feet, under the abdominal flap. I had a real egg 

 in my hand, so I put it down on the ice close to this bird, and 

 the bird at once left the lump of ice and shuffled to the real egg 

 and pushed it in under its flap on to the feet. It apparently knew 

 the difference, and it shows how strong is the desire to brood over 

 something. 



The three birds that we killed and skinned were very thickly 

 blubbered, and the oil we got from them burnt very w r ell indeed 

 and much more fiercely than the seal oil. There was about 

 24 inch of pure fat under the skin. The birds were in excellent 

 plumage. Bowers noticed there was very little soiled sea ice 

 where they were standing, which also supports the idea of a very 

 recent arrival, or recent freezing of the bay ice, or both. 



There was another small group of Emperors wandering by 

 the ice foot down which we came, but none of them had eggs. 

 We saw no others. 



The sea was frozen over as far as the horizon. There was a 

 little evidence of pressure in cracks of the sea ice in the bay. Our 



