A PECULIAR PEOPLE 13 
young, these mountaineers must make several 
journeys during each twenty-four hours, to carry 
their enormous bellyfuls of Euphausia all the 
way from the sea to their young on the nests—a 
weary climb for their little legs and bulky bodies, 
each upward journey taking them some two hours 
of strenuous climbing.” 
Not until the eggs have been laid does either 
parent go to feed. Then one of them goes off to the 
water and stays away in many cases for seven to ten 
days, after which it returns and gives the other its 
leave. The shortest period of total abstinence from 
food is about eighteen days, and the longest about 
twenty-eight days—a good instance of the parental 
sacrifice so characteristic of many of the finest 
expressions of animal life. When the chicks are 
hatched, the parents relieve one another at frequent 
intervals, and their shape, always quaint, becomes 
grotesque when they return so heavily laden with 
crustaceans that they have to lean back to keep 
their balance. Sometimes they try to carry so 
much that they lose it all. The chicks feed, as 
young cormorants do, by thrusting their head into 
the parental gullet. When the hen is sitting, nothing, 
not even a wrangle with her next-door neighbor, 
will induce her to move until her turn comes; but 
the cocks are easily led astray by their combative- 
ness, and often do a lot of harm in the crowded 
rookery in spite of the protests of adjacent birds 
who are seen trying to make peace. 
In the water the Adélie has but one enemy, the 
