PARENTS CARRY WATER Both birds incubate the eggs, the male by night, the female by day, and both parents care for the young. But it is the male only that brings water to the young. He rubs his breast violently up and down on the ground, and then, his feathers awry, he gets into his drinking water and saturates the feathers of his under parts. Then, in captivity, he would run to the hen, make a demonstration, whereupon the young would run out from under her, get under him, and suck the water from his feathers. This they did by passing the feathers through their bills, continuing and changing about until the supply was exhausted. It was found that until the young can fly they take water in no other way. This was in captivity. Presumably in the wild the process is the same, the adult flying with wet under parts from the water hole to the resting place where the young are under the care of the female. The similarity of the young sucking water from the feathers to young mammals suckling their mother has been pointed out. But another and a truer similarity exists: that of the young sand grouse getting water from the feathers, and young quail getting water from dew-wet leaves in areas where dew is heavy and there is but little surface water. BIRD GRAVEYARDS [Illustration] The best-known stories of animal graveyards are those of elephants. But when I asked the curator of mammals about them the answer I got was little better than a snort. Apparently the evidence for them is so vague that it's little better than a myth. But in birds we have a few bits of evidence from far-scattered places that occasionally such things as graveyards exist. In the antarctic Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy found on the island of South Georgia a place where Johnny penguins went to die. It was in a lake in a coastal range of hills. The lake bottom was thickly strewn with scores of penguin bodies, all of which had apparently died a natural death. The icy water, Murphy thought, might preserve them for years. The hills, away from the sea, seem a surprising place for the graveyard of such aquatic birds as the penguins, but it correlates with another peculiarity of their mental makeup. They like to nest on high land, or at least far from the sea. The blind instinctiveness of much penguin behavior is well shown by these birds when there is no high land on their nesting island. Then they may nest so far from the beach on which they land that they are close to the water on the other side. Yet they always returned to the sea by the long route, never taking the shorter route.