INTRODUCTION xli 
below were numerous little dots which resolved themselves 
into Emperor penguins. Could this be the breeding-place 
of these wonderful birds? Ifso, they must nurse their eggs 
in mid-winter, in unimagined cold and darkness. 
Five days more elapsed before further investigation 
could be made, for a violent blizzard kept the party in 
their tents. On October 18 they set out to climb the high 
pressure ridges which lie between the level barrier and 
the sea. They found that their conjectures were right: 
there was the colony of Emperors. Several were nursing 
chicks, but all the ice in the Ross Sea was gone; only the 
small bay of ice remained. The number of adult birds was 
estimated at four hundred, the number of living chicks was 
thirty, and there were some eighty dead ones. No eggs 
were found.! 
Several more journeys were made to this spot while the 
Discovery was in the south, generally in the spring; and 
the sum total of the information gained came to something 
like this. The Emperor is a bird which cannot fly, lives on 
fish which it catches in the sea, and never steps on land 
even to breed. For a reason which was not then under- 
stood it lays its eggs upon the bare ice some time during 
the winter and carries out the whole process of incubation 
on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet pressed closely 
toa patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and protected 
from the intense cold by a loose falling lappet of skin and 
feathers. By September 12, the earliest date upon which a 
party arrived, all the eggs which were not broken or addled 
were hatched, and there were then about a thousand adult 
Emperors in the rookery. Arriving again on October 19, 
a party experienced a ten days’ blizzard which confined 
them during seven days to their tents, but during their 
windy visit they saw one of the most interesting scenes in 
natural history. The story must be told by Wilson, who 
was there: 
“The day before the storm broke we were on an old 
outlying cone of Mount Terror, about 1300 feet above the 
sea. Below us lay the Emperor penguin rookery on the 
1 See Scott, Voyage of the Discovery, vol. ii. pp. 5, 6, 490. 
