THE ADELIE PENGUIN. 57 
ments during the winter months in the pack. From Dr. Cook’s account it is 
evident that the general exodus from the pack ice to the breeding places in the 
south, of all or most of the black-throated adults, led him to consider the white 
throats of the immature birds to be a form of summer plumage. Obviously the sudden 
relative increase in the number of immature birds in the pack ice when the adults left 
his neighbourhood, at the commencement of the spring, misled him. His observation, 
however, was borne out by our own as we made our way through the ice-pack in 
January. There was a large proportion of white-throated immature birds there 
which were certainly not breeding. Just a year old at the time, they had yet 
another year to wait before they would join the southern migration to the nesting 
colonies. Their home till then was the pack ice and the open sea. There were, also, in 
the pack ice in January quite a number of adults, which presumably were not taking 
part in the nesting of that particular season. 
From March, therefore, till the latter end of August, the Adélie Penguins, both 
young and old, are scattered over the northern regions of the ice, where they spend the 
winter, within easy reach of food and open water. They are also during this time 
more or less gregarious in habit, though markedly less so than they are in the summer 
season. 
Wherever in the pack ice they can depend upon an open lead of water, at the foot, 
for example, of an iceberg, penguins may be found in small companies, both young 
and old, throughout the winter. Not so, however, farther south, where neither sign 
nor trace of an Adélie can be found from March till the following spring, September or 
October. What is exactly the farthest point to the south in the Victoria quadrant at 
which this bird may be found during the winter months, it is at present impossible to 
say, but one may take their average limits from the beginning of October to the 
end of February as lying between 61° and 78° 50'S. Lat., and from the beginning of 
March to the end of September from 61° S. Lat. to the Antarctic Circle. Individual 
birds have been known to wander, apparently lost, on the Great Ice Barrier some 60 or 
70 miles from open water, but this was certainly accidental. The general migration 
southward from the pack ice applies to the adults only, and occurs about the middle of 
October. The general migration to the pack ice north again takes place in two 
sections, that of the adults about the third week in January and that of the season’s 
young a week or two later. Such adults as we found at the nesting rookeries after 
this were always in full moult, and one must believe that their moult had inconveniently 
overtaken them before they started north, and so enforced their waiting till its com- 
pletion. Amongst the more southern individuals the moult begins in the latter end of 
February ; on Feb. 17th in 1904, when we landed at Cape Adare, we found a very 
large number of adults, all moulting; there was then not a single immature bird with 
them. They had but one choice, either to leave the safety of the land on an icefloe, 
which might break up and precipitate them into the water, or to remain safely where 
they were on land and wait for a fortnight till their moult was completed, and then go 
