On October 27 though the stream of arrivals continued there were wide gaps in it. It appeared to be thinning. For an hour in the forenoon it stopped altogether, and at the end of this time a storm of wind from the south struck us and continued for another hour with thick drift. Probably clear of Cape Adare the wind had been blowing before it reached us, and had stopped the birds' progress across the ice.
During the storm the rookery was completely silenced, most of the birds lying with their heads to the wind. A good many skuas arrived that day. Some chips of white, glistening quartz had been thrown down by our hut door recently, and later I found two of these chips in a nest about thirty yards away, showing up brightly against the black basalt of which all the pebbles on the rookery were composed.
As a rule the penguins were careful to select rounded stones for their nests, but these fragments of quartz were jagged and uncomfortable, and most unsuitable for nest building. Thus it was evidently the brightness of the stones which attracted them. Whilst I looked on, the owners of the pieces of quartz were wrangling with their neighbours, and a penguin in a nest behind shot out its beak and stole one of the pieces, placing it in its own nest. I had brought Campbell out to show him the pieces of quartz, and he witnessed the last incident with me.
Fig. 29. Cocks fighting for Hens
Fig. 30. Penguin on Nest
I may here mention an experiment I tried some days later. I painted some pebbles a bright red and had others covered with bright green cotton material as I had no other coloured paint. Mixing a handful of these coloured stones together I placed them in a little heap amongst natural black ones near a nest-covered knoll. Returning in a few hours I found nearly all the red stones and one or two of the green ones gone, and later found them in nests. Later still, all the red ones had disappeared, and last of all the green ones. I traced nearly all these to nests, and found a few days later that, like the pieces of white quartz, they were being stolen from nest to nest and thus slowly being distributed in different directions. At other times I saw pieces of tin, pieces of glass, half a stick of chocolate, and the head of a bright metal teaspoon in different nests near our hut, the articles evidently having been taken from our scrap-heap. Thus it is evident that penguins like bright colours and prefer red to green, as instanced by the selection of the coloured pebbles. I am sorry that I did not carry these colour tests further.
During October 29 the stream of arrivals was undiminished, but the next day it slackened considerably, and during the next two days stopped altogether, all the rising ground of the rookery now being literally crammed full with nests, several thousands of them being scattered up the slopes of Cape Adare to a height of a thousand feet.