THE MOULTING OF THE KING PENGUIN. 
121 
avoided going into the water, its appetite continued good, and it apparently fed as 
freely as usual until the feathers began -to fall out. * ft is extremely probable that, 
both in the time and in the duration of the moult, this bird conformed to the 
practice followed. by immature birds living under natural conditions on the Pacific 
Coast of South America. 
If the two young King Penguins which reached Scotland in January 1914 after 
a six weeks’ voyage were hatched in January 1913, they would, had they remained 
in South Georgia, in all probability have donned the immature coat in February 
1914, and assumed the adult plumage in February or March 1915. Upset by the 
voyage, they made no attempt to moult either in February or March 1914 ; and 
when in May a beginning was made to shed their down, the response to the stimuli 
was so feeble that little progress was made, with the result that the assumption of 
the immature coat was delayed until the autumn — the moult being completed in 
xAugust by one bird, and in September by the other. There was, however, compensa- 
tion for the five or six months’ delay in as far as the down coat, instead of being 
succeeded by an ordinary immature coat, gave place, as already indicated, to a coat 
having nearly all the characteristics of the mature or adult plumage. 
By the time the immature coat was completed in the autumn of 1914, the two 
young King Penguins had evidently become thoroughly acclimatised. One result 
of the adaptation to the new environment was the absence of any attempt to moult 
in the spring of 1915. In May 1915 the two immature birds, and the surviving old 
King Penguin brought along with them from South Georgia, were transferred to a 
specially constructed enclosure provided with a pool large enough and deep enough 
to admit of their taking ample exercise. Up to about the middle of July they fed 
freely, and were probably as healthy and vigorous and provided with as fine a coat 
as their relatives of a like age ifi South Georgia. But towards the end of July, in 
their every movement and attitude they gave onlookers the impression that life was 
no longer worth living. They took little exercise, ate little, and rarely made any 
attempt to smooth down their ruffled and somewhat faded feathers. But when, on 
August 17, moulting actually started, their drooping spirits revived, and, instead of 
brooding over their troubles, they set to work to scrape off the dead, but still 
adhering, feathers. The moulting, once begun, proceeded at so rapid a pace that, 
in one of the immature birds, the whole of the old feathers were completely displaced 
by full-grown, brilliant new feathers in the short period of ten days ; in the other 
two birds the moulting from start to finish was completed in eleven days. 
Had the adult bird which reached the Scottish Zoological Park in January 1914 
remained in South Georgia, it would probably have moulted in February or March ; 
but owing to the different climate, and the unusual conditions it encountered before 
and after its arrival in Scotland, moulting was postponed until October. But by the 
summer of 1915 the old bird was so completely acclimatised that, like the acclimat- 
* Bartlett, Proc. Zool. Soc., 1879 
