ADELIE PENGUIN—LEVICK. 61 
It is evident that during the first days of his wedded life a cock only keeps his 
mate by dint of constant vigilance and some further battles; I often saw errant cocks 
making overtures to mated hens. I do not think, however, that this ever takes place 
after the eggs are laid and regular family life has begun. 
With red paint I marked the breasts of a good many couples, renewing the paint 
as it faded, through the whole breeding season, and in every case the couples remained 
perfectly faithful to one another. 
3.—NESTING, EGGS, INCUBATION, FEEDING AND FIGHTING. 
Just outside our hut door our geologist left some chips of white quartz lying on 
the ground. Shortly afterwards, I found two of these chips in a nest about thirty yards 
away, and they showed up brightly and distinctly against the black basalt of which all 
the pebbles on the rookery are composed. As a rule the penguins are careful to select 
rounded stones for their nests (Pl. V), and as these fragments of quartz were jagged and 
uncomfortable, they were most unsuitable for nest building, and it was evidently the 
brightness of the stones which attracted them. As I looked on, the owners of the 
pieces of quartz were wrangling with some neighbours, and a penguin in the nest 
behind them shot out its beak and stole one of the pieces, which it placed in its own 
nest. Later, both pieces were stolen from nest to nest, till I lost them. 
This incident suggested an experiment which I tried immediately. I painted 
some pebbles a bright vermilion, and had others covered with a bright green material, 
as I had no other coloured paint. Mixing a handful of these coloured stones together, I 
placed them in a little heap near a nest-covered knoll. Some hours later, | returned to 
find nearly all the red stones and one or two of the green ones gone, and afterwards 
found them in nests. Later still, the rest of the red stones vanished, and, last of all, 
the green ones. 
All these coloured stones were taken to nests, and some time later, like the pieces 
of quartz, they were stolen from nest to nest, and soon were distributed widely in all 
directions. 
On other occasions I saw pieces of tin, pieces of glass, half a stick of chocolate, and 
the head of a bright metal teaspoon in various nests near our hut, the articles evidently 
having been taken from our scrap heap. It then became evident that penguins like 
bright colours, and they seem to prefer red to green, as instanced by the selection of 
the coloured pebbles. 
Though most nests are built of a mixture of pebbles varying in size from very 
small to as big as the birds can carry, some individual couples make theirs entirely with 
very big stones, and some entirely with very small ones (PI. VI); and a large stoned 
nest and a small stoned nest may be seen side by side, in places where pebbles of all 
sizes may be collected. Some of the penguins choose stones so large that it is a matter 
