ADELIE PENGUIN. 53 



It is in this plumage, then, that the young Adelie Penguin is finally left to its 

 own resources at the end of the breeding season. The parents, according to some 

 observers, take considerable trouble in teaching their young to swim, coaxing them 

 to take the water before they migrate to the north themselves, that they may then be 

 independent. By others, however, it is stated that the adults, having watched over 

 their young till they have shed their down and are capable of taking to the water, and so 

 of finding food for themselves, desert them for good and all, and make their own way 

 independently to the north, leaving the young birds to be taught by sheer necessity to 

 find out how to swim and follow after them. 



Supporting this latter account is the fact that Mr. Borchgrevink, on his first 

 visit to Cape Adare, found the colony tenanted almost entirely by white-throated young 

 birds of that season's breeding. " The absence of the black-throated penguin at that 

 time is easily explained," he says, " by the fact that the old ones, uncharitable as it 

 may seem, leave their young ones and go to sea towards the time their offspring should 

 be able to look after themselves." And again: "When the old penguins left, the 

 young ones, being able, like the rest of their kind, to live for a long while without food, 

 remained on shore till starvation forced them to work for their own living, and then 

 they, too, went to sea." 



A similar course is taken by a number of other birds, as for example by the Little 

 Auk and the Snow Bunting, amongst Arctic birds, while examples from our own 

 country such as the Cuckoo will readily suggest themselves.* Unhappily we were not 

 able to settle this point, as we were never within reach of an Adelie Penguin 

 rookery at the time when this migration was commencing. We were really too far 

 south in the ' Discovery ' for the constant observation of any bird except McCormick's 

 Skua, and we were therefore dependent upon the opportunities that could be seized in 

 cruising with the ship or by sledge travelling for observations made at the breeding 

 places of the Antarctic birds. 



We were enabled in the course of our visits to the various Adelie Penguin 

 rookeries above mentioned to see the coming of the first few birds in spring, and to 

 see them choose their nesting sites and then to arrive in their thousands. We saw 

 their courtship and nesting, and obtained their eggs, and a series of the young from 

 the first stage to the last in down. It appears, therefore, that when the nestlings' down 

 is shed and the old birds have gone north, the glossy-coated, blue-backed, and white- 

 throated young are thrown upon their own resources with nothing but their instincts 

 for guidance. It was but natural that some of them should go adrift, and instead of 

 going northward where their parents were in safety in the pack, that a few should 

 wander to the south in our direction. 



By February 5th we had seen the last of the adults in 1904, and from that date 

 onward we saw none but young birds, the white-throated and immature. But these 

 again were young birds of two very different ages, and the older of the two now 



* Little Auk = Mergulus alle ; Snow Bunting = Plectrophenax nivalis ; Cuckoo = Cuculus canorus. 



