A PECULIAR PEOPLE 18 



young, these mountaineers must make several 

 journeys during each twenty-four hours, to carry 

 their enormous bellyfuls of Euphausia all the 

 way from the sea to their young on the nests a 

 weary climb for their little legs and bulky bodies, 

 each upward journey taking them some two hours 

 of strenuous 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 finest 

 expressions of animal life. 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. Sometimes they try to carry so 

 much that they lose it all. The chicks feed, as 

 young cormorants do, by thrusting their head into 

 the parental gullet. When the hen is sitting, nothing, 

 not even a wrangle with her next-door neighbor, 

 will induce her to move until her turn comes; but 

 the cocks are easily led astray by their combative- 

 ness, and often do a lot of harm in the crowded 

 rookery in spite of the protests of adjacent birds 

 who are seen trying to make peace. 



In the water the Adelie has but one enemy, the 



