BIRDS OF THE AUSTRALASIAN SOUTH POLAR QUADRANT. 
The chick emerges with a well-developed egg scale on the beak, which 
it sheds in a day or two. It is a mere ball of pale slate-grey fluff, with 
pale blue beak, feet and legs ; the grey down has much more blue in it 
than buff. 
The paired adults are very friendly and have an obvious mutual care 
for one another and their chicks. The chicks were able to run at once on 
emerging from the egg, and the two young ones soon get separated from 
one another. The parents seem to know from the first that too much care 
and coddling will unfit them for such a rigorous climate. Consequently, 
one rarely sees the parent sitting on the chicks. She will be somewhere 
close to them, but they themselves will be generally some feet away from 
her, sunning themselves or taking shelter under the lee of a neighbouring 
rock. A few days after hatching the chicks fight tooth and nail with one 
another over some trivial bit of food, locked each to the other by every 
claw and fighting with loud squeals as they use their tiny beaks. They 
are not fed, as are so many birds, directly from the parent’s bill or pharynx, 
but from the first they pick up for themselves, and I have seen the parents 
put bits of regurgitated fish and crustaceans on the ground for them to 
peck, thus treating them exactly as a fowl of the farmyard treats her chicks. 
It is a noticeable fact in connection with this bird that only one 
of the two hatched in a nest survives. As they separate the mother is 
engrossed with one, the other wanders out of reach and is sooner or 
later snapped up by a hungry neighbour. 
From the end of October to the beginning of April may be considered 
the six summer months given up by this bird to the business of repro¬ 
duction. It inhabits during this period the most southerly part of the 
globe that can by any bird or beast, including man, be looked upon as habit¬ 
able at all. No bird goes farther south than this, and very few as far. 
When the young were well feathered and fully capable of looking after 
themselves, they appeared with their elders round the ship in search of 
scraps and refuse. They are easily known by their dark uniform plumage. 
They have not got the bleached and whitened feathers that give their 
elders at the end of summer a characteristic hoary look, nor have they the 
straw-coloured ring round the back of the neck that becomes prominent in 
the second year and increases then with each year. The changes in plumage 
from the slate-grey downy nestling to the adult are much as follows. The 
first tiling noticeable before the feathers of the whig are properly developed 
is a gradual blackening of the pale blue feet from the claws upwards, a blackening 
which gradually creeps up the toes and webs with a definite line of demar¬ 
cation, extending by degrees till the feet and legs are black to the feathers 
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