BIRDS OF THE AUSTRALASIAN SOUTH POLAR QUADRANT. 
At the end of March they began their migration northward, and finally 
disappeared on the 30th, to be seen no more till the following spring. 
This Skua is of a sociable disposition, notwithstanding its cannibal 
tendencies, feeding, nesting and basking in the sun in groups. It is, more¬ 
over, a very cleanly bird, and repeated search failed to reveal an external 
parasite of any kind. It is particularly fond of bathing in the thaw-water 
pools along the hills where the snow is melted by the heat absorbed from 
the sun’s rays by the adjacent rocks. Round and in these pools a group of 
Skuas might always be found. In the adjacent snow their tracks are found, 
and here and there a pattern in the hardened sin-face that might puzzle 
any one who had not watched them there. Just ahead of two footmarks 
is a fan-shaped series of linear scoop-marks, made by the birds beak as it 
squats comfortably on the snow and proceeds to satisfy its thirst by eating 
it. 
The Skua has, no doubt, good sight, but its sense of smell must be 
little short of marvellous, having come 150 miles up wind to the killing of a 
sledge dog. 
On March 5th, in McMurdo’s Sound, we shot the first of the year’s brood 
upon the wing. It had a straw-coloured ring on the neck very imperfectly 
marked and was otherwise very dark all over. Its legs were piebald, black 
and pale bluish-w r hite. 
McCormick’s Skua chooses for its nesting site the northern or north¬ 
eastern face of some gravel-covered hillside, talus, or moraine cone, where 
the snow has either never settled on account of the winter winds, or from 
which it has been banished by the summer sun. We were able to inspect 
a score or more of their nesting colonies. They breed almost invariably in 
groups or colonies, with the nests only sufficiently widely separated to avoid 
unnecessary collision, which between birds of such strong thieving and 
criminal tendencies leads to awkwardness. Often the colony is situated 
close to, and even mingling with, the rookery of Adelie Penguins. This is 
the case at Cape Adare, where the Skuas nest in the screes and upland 
heights of the higher ground in close companionship with the Adelie Penguins 
that choose the high ground for their nests. A thousand feet above the 
moraine flat at sea level, where the majority of the Penguins nest, may be 
found in close proximity both Skua’s and Penguin’s nests with eggs and 
young. Again, at Cape Crozier, the Skuas were collected in a nesting colony 
on the de&ns-strewn slopes of Mount Terror, overlooking many thousands 
of Adelie’s nests. So also at Wood Bay and at Cape Royds. The last-named 
rookery, one of the smallest Adelie Penguin rookeries we saw, was, strange 
to say, the largest of all the Skua’s breeding colonies. Literally scores 
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