A PECULIAR PEOPLE 



The nests are made of rounded stones which the 

 cock collects, stealing them when he can. Jagged 

 pieces of quartz seem to be much prized, and there 

 was an eager demand for Dr. Levick's painted 

 pebbles, red being preferred to green. It is char- 

 acteristic of the Adelie penguins to climb heights 

 and nest on cliffs. Some of them, coming straight 

 from the sea, make at once for the heights, and 

 climb laboriously from ledge to ledge. Dr. Levick 

 found a colony at the very top, about 700 feet above 

 the sea, a site which involves prodigious toil. For 

 during the whole of the time when they are rearing 

 their young, these mountaineers had to make 

 several journeys every day carrying quantities of 

 food for the young ones, each journey meaning 

 about two hours' stiff climbing. 



Not until the eggs have been laid does either 

 parent go to feed. Then one of them goes off to the 

 water and stays away in many cases for seven to 

 ten days, after which it returns and gives the other 

 its leave. The shortest period of total abstinence 

 from food is about eighteen days, and the longest 

 about twenty-eight days a good instance of the 

 parental sacrifice so characteristic of many of the 

 higher animals. When the chicks are hatched, 

 the parents relieve one another at frequent intervals, 

 and their shape, always quaint, becomes grotesque 

 when they return so heavily laden with crustaceans 

 that they have to lean back to keep their balance. 

 They carry the crustaceans in their food-canal, 

 and sometimes they try to carry so much that they 

 lose it all. The chicks feed, as young cormorants do, 



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