ADELIE PENGUIN. 
The observations made show that but two journeys could be made to 
the summit during the twenty-four hours. 
To return now to the actual feeding of the chickens. They have a method 
which is altogether entertaining, a method which exemplifies in a direct and 
indisputable manner the far-reaching law of the survival of the fittest. One 
may stand in the noisy crowd of Penguins at Cape Crozier and watch the 
law in being from its many-sided aspects; the cruelty, the pathos, the 
humour, and yet the admirable perfection of the whole system being 
irresistibly brought home to the observer. 
The sooty-grey young ones in the third week of January were almost 
as big as their parents, and quite as active. Of these young birds there 
were literally thousands, and all were hungry, many very hungry. Moreover, 
each individual chicken acted upon the supposition that every old bird, as 
it came up from the shore, was full of shrimps. On this assumption the 
old bird had no choice but to run the gauntlet. Chased incontinently up 
and down the rookery by the unfortunate infants, the fond parent ran 
hither and thither with a keen eye open for the chicken it once had called 
its own. Driven at last to bay, it could only turn to swear and silence 
its persecuting followers for the moment with a vicious peck, but the moment 
its search again commenced it would be caught up and followed and worried 
in precisely the same way by a fresh relay of young ones, all belonging to 
someone else. Although the chicks looked upon each full-bellied adult, 
not only as a parent, but a food supply, the parents tried to find and feed their 
own offspring. The more robust of the young worried the adult until he 
was fed. But with the less robust a pathetic ending was the rule; it got 
weaker from exhaustion, cold and hunger till a Skua in its beat drops down 
beside it, and with a few strong vicious pecks put an end to its failing life. 
All round the rookery are Skuas’ nests with their young, of which not 
50 per cent, survive their infancy; not 30 per cent, of the Emperor Penguins’ 
chicks survive; and from the corpse-strewn condition of the acres occupied 
by an Adelie Penguin rookery, where not merely egg-shells by the score, but 
mangled chicken remnants by the many hundred, lie to be trodden into frozen 
dust and muddy guano, the death rate is excessive. No one can walk over 
a mile or two of such a breeding ground without being astonished by the 
number of dead around him. He will notice, moreover, at once that it is 
not only the youngest of the chickens that die, but that a very large proportion 
are birds winch have already shed their dow r n and have assumed the plumage 
which enables them to take the water. 
The Adelie Penguins begin to arrive at Cape Adare as early as the middle 
of September, but the more southern rookeries at Cape Crozier were tenanted 
81 
