How they made journeys in the early spring but never arrived
early enough to get eggs and only found parents and chicks. They
concluded that the Emperor was an impossible kind of bird who, for some
reason or other, nests in the middle of the Antarctic winter with the
temperature anywhere below seventy degrees of frost, and the blizzards
blowing, always blowing, against his devoted back. And they found him
holding his precious chick balanced upon his big feet, and pressing it
maternally, or paternally (for both sexes squabble for the privilege)
against a bald patch in his breast. And when at last he simply must go
and eat something in the open leads near by, he just puts the child down
on the ice, and twenty chickless Emperors rush to pick it up. And they
fight over it, and so tear it that sometimes it will die. And, if it can,
it will crawl into any ice-crack to escape from so much kindness, and
there it will freeze. Likewise many broken and addled eggs were found,
and it is clear that the mortality is very great. But some survive, and
summer comes; and when a big blizzard is going to blow (they know all
about the weather), the parents take the children out for miles across
the sea-ice, until they reach the threshold of the open sea. And there
they sit until the wind comes, and the swell rises, and breaks that
ice-floe off; and away they go in the blinding drift to join the main
pack-ice, with a private yacht all to themselves.
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