The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

Those astounding birds knew no such emotion as fear. Under the impulse of the icy waves dashing straight up to the edge of the ice floes, those giant penguins shot out of the water, sped like catapulted birds curving through the air, and landed on their cushioned breasts high and dry, fully ten feet back from the edge of the floe. They flocked together, they waddled about erect and serene, heads high in air, and marched close up to the ice-bound ship to see what it was all about. Men and horses freely walked among them without exciting fear, and when the birds gathered in a vast assemblage the naturalists and photographers were welcomed everywhere. And indeed those birds were well-nigh the most fortunate birds in all the world. The men who found them were not low-browed butchers thinking only of "oil" or "fertilizer"; and they did not go to work at once to club all those helpless birds into masses of death and corruption. Those men wondered at them, laughed at them, photographed them, studied them,--and left them in peace! What a thundering contrast that was with the usual course of Man, the bloody savage, under such circumstances! The coast of Lower California once swarmed with seals, sea-lions and birds, and the waters of the Gulf were alive with whales. Now the Gulf and the shores of the Peninsula are as barren of wild life as Death Valley. The history of the whaling industry contains many sickening records of the wholesale slaughter by savage whalers of newly discovered herds of walrus, seals and sea birds that through isolation knew no fear, and were easily clubbed to death en masse.