CHAPTER VI
ANIMAL LIFE
Brief reference has already been made to some of the polar animals and their habits, but it is necessary to give a more detailed account of this aspect of Polar Regions. The striking feature of the Antarctic Regions, with one partial exception, is the entire absence of land vertebrates. There are no land mammals—no bears, wolves, foxes, or lemmings; no musk-oxen, reindeer, or hares, neither are there any land birds with the exception of the sheath-bill (Chionis), which is only a summer visitor to the shores of most Antarctic lands. Sone white-legged sheath-bills, however, remained at Scotia Bay all the winter of 1903, and Sir Joseph Hooker tells me that the black-legged sheath-bill remains in Kerguelen all the winter. Neither are there any fresh-water fishes, as there are practically no rivers and only a few pools which are scarcely ever free of ice. This striking fact makes inland journeys in the Antarctic Regions very much more serious business than the inland journeys in the Arctic Regions, since every pound of
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