Several more journeys were made to this spot while the Discovery was in
the south, generally in the spring; and the sum total of the information
gained came to something like this. The Emperor is a bird which cannot
fly, lives on fish which it catches in the sea, and never steps on land
even to breed. For a reason which was not then understood it lays its
eggs upon the bare ice some time during the winter and carries out the
whole process of incubation on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet
pressed closely to a patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and
protected from the intense cold by a loose falling lappet of skin and
feathers. By September 12, the earliest date upon which a party arrived,
all the eggs which were not broken or addled were hatched, and there were
then about a thousand adult Emperors in the rookery. Arriving again on
October 19, a party experienced a ten days' blizzard which confined them
during seven days to their tents, but during their windy visit they saw
one of the most interesting scenes in natural history. The story must be
told by Wilson, who was there:

"The day before the storm broke we were on an old outlying cone of Mount
Terror, about 1300 feet above the sea. Below us lay the Emperor penguin
rookery on the bay ice, and Ross Sea, completely frozen over, was a
plain of firm white ice to the horizon. There was not even the lane of
open water which usually runs along the Barrier cliff stretching away as
it does like a winding thread to the east and out of sight. No space or
crack could be seen with open water. Nevertheless the Emperors were
unsettled owing, there can be no doubt, to the knowledge that bad weather
was impending. The mere fact that the usual canal of open water was not
to be seen along the face of the Barrier meant that the ice in Ross Sea
had a southerly drift. This in itself was unusual, and was caused by a
northerly wind with snow, the precursor here of a storm from the