SOUTH POLAR SKUA. 
of nests could be discovered during a day’s tramp over the rocky cape. 
Nowhere flat, this little peninsula was extremely rugged, both from the 
irregular weathering of a hard volcanic rock, and from the fact that over it 
has run at some long-distant period a huge ice-sheet, v r hich has scooped it 
out into little hills and valleys and terraced it with moraine heaps. Each 
of those little hills or its adjacent valley was occupied by a pah- of Skuas 
and each little rise overcome in a morning’s walk from the camp laid one 
open to the noisy attention of another pair. 
Round and round one’s head the bird wheeled with a shrieking clatter, 
every now and again dashing down as though to strike. From time to 
time the blow took effect, and sometimes took one’s cap off. Occasionally 
one might be surprised by a sudden blow on the forehead, but always as 
far as I could judge, without exception, it was given with the wing, and 
the claws were never used in the attack. While her partner was thus doing 
his part to frighten off the intruder, the sitting bird w r as loudly and per¬ 
sistently advertising the exact position of the nest, nor would she leave her 
post till we had come, sometimes, to within a yard or two. 
The bird’s cry is much like that of other Gulls, a loud and anxious, 
rapidly repeated cry, and very harsh. But the cry of the fledgling is very 
different. At Cape Adare I thought for some time that there must be a bird 
of the Sandpiper type about, for I constantly heard a liquid, melancholy, 
trill. By degrees, however, it brought me to a fledgling Skua, which was 
just beginning to use its W'ings for flight. I saw it whistling with a most 
musical note, wholly unlike the harsh cry of the adult. 
The bird makes no attempt at concealment, though its colour as well as 
the colour of its eggs might be considered to be specially adapted to the 
nature of the ground, but with such habits as the Skua’s there is obviously 
nothing in it. Even when the bird is away from its nest, one has but to 
climb a little rocky .hillock, and somewhere in the hollows under one’s eye 
will be apparent two eggs in a shallow scooped-out nest, easily visible even 
at a distance of ten or twenty yards. We never found more than two eggs 
in a nest, and in a certain number of cases in every rookery one egg is con¬ 
sidered sufficient for incubation, the other doubtless having been stolen by 
a marauding neighbour. In many cases there is to be found in company 
with a normal egg, another with a much thinner shell and a pale bluish 
ground, but with little or no marking; this bluish colour soon disappears 
and is replaced by a buff or brownish-yellow tone in Museum specimens. 
Sometimes a thin-shelled egg may be ringed round the upper third by 
minute and crowded dots or speckles, but be lacking in the characteristic 
blotches of the normal egg. 
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