Study Of Antarctic Birds By Scientists

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31831, 8 November 1968, Page 12

Study Of Antarctic Birds By Scientists

Twenty - nine scientists, field assistants and others interested in Antarctica and its wild-life will arrive in Christchurch from the United States this Sunday. Some of them will leave the next day for Antarctica. Among them will be Dr R. L. Penney, of the Rockefeller University, who will study bird navigation, particularly that of the Adelie penguin, for the New York Zoological Society. Dr Penney will take captive birds back to the United States where they will be re-

leased on frozen lakes in the northern part of the United States. He hopes study of the behaviour of the bird in the northern hemisphere under the apparent reversed azimuth motion of the northern hemisphere sun will provide correlative data for his experiments in the southern hemisphere and under controlled laboratory conditions. Research is also planned on the south polar skua. Dr Penney will capture skuas at Cape Bird and release them from South Pole, Byrd Station and Brockton Station in an effort to discover whether the skua, a flying bird, has equivalent orientation mechanisms to those of the flightless penguins. When Dr Penney returns he will take about 60 penguins, 11 skuas and six Weddell seal pups to the United States. Apart from the wildlife required for experiments most of the birds and seals will go to zoos at St Louis, Detroit, Cincinatti, and Milwaukee.