42 EDWARD A. WILSON. 



course of events, when feeding or when travelling, it is doubtful whether a longer 

 submersion could be borne with comfort. All that can be seen by watching the 

 bird in the water is that its submersion is of very short duration when travelling 

 rapidly in a straight line. It will leave the water for breath by a leap in the 

 air at intervals which vary from 20 to 50 yards or more ; it would be no rare feat 

 to pass under an icefloe of 100 yards, and in doing so the sense of direction is 

 well maintained beneath the ice, as one may see, if the bird is endeavouring to reach 

 a companion some little distance away. 



The food of the Adelie Penguin during the summer months consists almost 

 entirely of Euphausia superba, a red shrimp-like schizopodous crustacean, which exists 

 in vast numbers in the shallow seas of the Antarctic. These red crustaceans can be 

 seen sometimes in large numbers in the water, frequenting chiefly the ice pack, the 

 edges of the icefloes, or the foot of the ice cliffs which form the sea faces of the 



O ' 



Barrier snow plains. Here, therefore in the early hours of the morning, more 

 abundantly than at any other time, but at every other hour in the twenty-four as 

 well may be seen hundreds of penguins feeding, their black heads and loud voices 

 proclaiming their business, while they swiftly dash in and out of the water in small 

 companies, like a school of little dolphins. 



In its passage through the alimentary track the colouring matter of this 

 crustacean is apparently little altered, so that the ground which is occupied by an 

 Adelie Penguin rookery takes on a brick-red colour from the excrement, and 

 this can be recognised by sight, even at a very considerable distance from the shore. 

 Not only does the general colour of the ground give evidence from afar of the situation 

 of a rookery of Adelie Penguins, but the smell has in more thaii one case directed us 

 to search for and discover a hitherto unsuspected colony. The smell is unpleasantly 

 fishy and ammoniacal. After a landing from the ship, our clothes and boots, notwith- 

 standing a vigorous cleansing, kept us in constant recollection of the rookery by 

 impregnating our cabins with the smell for days. It is quite unlike the smell of 

 anything else, and to one who has spent a day or two in their midst, though he were 

 blindfold, the smell of the museum skin of a penguin chicken would at once recall the 

 harsh and noisy clamour of some crowded rookery of Adelie Penguins in the south. 



On one occasion this smell was forced upon our notice when we were no less than 

 30 miles from the nearest penguin rookery. Travelling at the time with sledges on 

 the Barrier surface to the south of Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, we were thinking 

 of anything in the world but penguins, when a gentle breeze sprang up across the 

 divide between these two mountains, blowing in a bee-line to us from the great 

 rookery at Cape Crozier, 30 miles away. The smell was faint but unmistakable, and 

 the truth of our perceptions was borne out a little later, when we found some 

 weathered penguins' feathers that had been carried in the same way over the divide, 

 itself a height of from 6,000 to 7,000 feet. We were, moreover, at the time making 

 observations on the quantity of ozone in the air, and in passing into the current which 



