98 ZOOLOGICAL LOG OF OMOND HOUSE 



Noted numerous cases of the young chasing the parent bird about to get food, but 

 the parents seem to be getting tired of the game and generally tried to run off and 

 avoid it, though the maternal instinct proved rather strong and would urge them to 

 stop and have compassion. 



How the young get into the water we did not see, but, the plunge once taken, 

 they are very soon left to shift for themselves, as the young birds we have seen on The 

 Beach were sometimes unaccompanied by any adult adelia penguin. If they happened 

 to be, the latter took no apparent interest in the youngsters. 



Even on the rookeries young birds are to be seen congregated in parties of a dozen 

 with no, or perhaps one, old bird near them. But this early turning adrift makes the 

 young bird pay a heavy toll. Abundant remains of recently killed young ones are 

 lying all over the place, while nellies, filled to repletion, are waddling all around and 

 sleeping on the snow slopes above the moraine. Nemesis, in the person of a scientist, 

 overtook one of these unwary sleeping murderers, but in return it was immortalized on 

 a photographic film before being sent per express to join its ancestors in the happy 

 hunting-ground where all is blood and blubber. 



Scores of skuas and dozens of gulls flying in flocks about the nellies as jackals do 

 about lions, assist in completing the tale of this Herodian holocaust, making up in 

 numbers what they lack in rapacity. 



Some of the skuas' eggs are just chipping but the majority are hatched, and the 

 young birds, which are at the outside a week old, have already begun to wander out 

 of the nest, and the little light-brown masses of down are very difficult to make out 

 against the background of brown moss. Two were taken for specimens. One young 

 paddy was taken, with the white feathers beginning to develop under the dark yellow- 

 brown down ; it would be about a fortnight old. Two more crested penguins were 

 caught, one, an old bird, on the shore just below where the previous three were got 

 the other, at the same place as the previous ones, appears to be a this year's bird, 

 from the size and immature appearance of the beak and crest. If this is so, do these 

 birds breed in the South Orkneys or has this youngster made the long journey from 

 South Georgia or the Falkland Islands to here at this early stage of its career ? 



A gull was shot which appears to be a this year's bird. Ringed penguins, terns, 

 Wilson's petrels and a few shags also noted. 



Numerous Weddell seals round the shore. 



Traps lifted : two isopods ; when they were put in a basin, a worm was observed 

 which seemed like the one previously noted as parasitic on this animal, but I did not 

 actually observe this one attached to the isopod. Also a few star-fish and cushion- 

 stars, one polychaete and some amphipods. 



Jan. 30th. Three species of penguins, nellies, skuas, gulls, terns, Wilson's 

 petrels and shags. 



At the skuas' nests on the moraine, on the west side of Scotia Bay, we got one 

 young bird. The skuas are not appreciably fiercer with young than with eggs, 



