8 EDWARD A. WILSON. 
return to their further history later, and meanwhile continue to give an account of the 
fourth and last journey that we made to Cape Crozier on behalf of the Emperor Penguins. 
Accompanied again by Cross and a naval stoker, Whitfield, I started for the 
spot on October 12th. Our journey out took just a week, and we arrived on the day 
on which Lieut. Skelton the year before had killed the chickens that he first brought 
home. It was possible, therefore, to compare the chickens of this year’s brood with those 
of the previous year, and we found them as nearly as possible identical in size. Moreover, 
the chicken we had kept alive in the ship was fully as big now as the biggest in the 
rookery, and we felt we might rightly take its rate of growth as an indication of what 
was going on under the more natural conditions at Cape Crozier in the rookery itself. 
The number of dead chickens had certainly increased during the month we were 
away. To compare with the last year’s skins, I picked out two of the largest living 
chicks that could be found. All were in down, and not one showed any sign of an 
approaching moult. The unemployed adults were still to be seen nursing dead chickens 
here and there, or waiting for a chance to seize a living one. 
We remained encamped as near the rookery as possible for close upon three 
weeks, experiencing a ten-days’ blizzard, which kept us confined to our sleeping bags 
for no less than seven days. Nevertheless, it was not such an ill wind that it blew 
no good to us, for had it not been for this southerly blizzard, we should have missed 
what was one of the most interesting sights we saw. 
It will be remembered that in describing the second journey made by Lieut. Royds 
to this rookery the year before, I said that he arrived on November 8th, and found 
that all the adults as well as all the chickens had disappeared. Our journey was 
therefore timed to watch, if possible, something of this migration to the north. The 
chicks, I knew, were still in down, and unfit to enter the water. How, then, did the 
parents take them north ? 
During the week that we were forced by the blizzard to be inactive, though we 
never actually saw the young ones taken, we saw enough to suggest a solution of this 
problem. The day before the storm broke we were on an old outlying cone of Mount 
Terror, about 1,300 feet above the sea. Below us lay the Emperor Penguin rookery 
on the bay ice, and Ross Sea, completely frozen over, was a plain of firm white ice to 
the horizon. There was not even the lane of open water which usually runs along the 
Barrier cliff stretching away as it does like a winding thread to the East and out of 
sight. No space or crack could be seen with open water. Nevertheless the Emperors 
were unsettled owing, there can be no doubt, to the knowledge that bad weather 
was impending. The mere fact that the usual canal of open water was not to be 
seen along the face of the Barrier meant that the ice in Ross Sea had a southerly 
drift. This in itself was unusual, and was caused by a northerly wind with snow, 
the precursor here of a storm from the south-west. The sky looked black and 
threatening, the barometer began to fall, and before long down came snowflakes on 
the upper heights of Mount Terror. 
