Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE STORK-LIKE BIRDS

THE GANNETS (Family Sulida)

Common Gannet Behaviour

Mr. Dixon describes another great breeding place on Borreag, an island about four miles from St. Kilda.”The flat, sloping top of one of these stupendous ocean rocks looks white as the driven snow, so thickly do the Gannets cluster there, and the sides are just as densely populated wherever the cliff is rugged and broken. So vast is this colony of birds that it may be seen distinctly forty miles away, looking like some huge vessel under full sail heading to windward."

But vast as are these nesting places, they are really insignificant as compared with conditions which prevailed on the Bird Rocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, less than fifty years ago. The Great Bird is a mass of rock, only about 350 yards long and from 50 to 150 yards wide, which rises abruptly from the sea, with mostly precipitous walls from 80 to 140 feet in height. The Little Bird is three quarters of a mile away; it is lower and much smaller.

One of the first, or perhaps the first, accounts of the Bird Rocks is by Jacques Cartier, written in 1534. In this he says: “These islands were as full of birds as any meadow is of grass, of which they do make their nests, and in the greater of them there was a great and infinite number of those we called Margaulx (Gannets), that are white and bigger than any geese.”Audubon passed these rocks in 1833, while on his cruise to Labrador, and”thought them covered with snow to the depth of several feet.”

On a closer approach he found that the”snow”was resolved into myriads of Gannets, showing that there had been little diminution in the numbers during the preceding three hundred years. In i860 the Bird Rocks were visited by Dr. Henry Bryant, who appears to have been the first ornithologist to actually set foot there.

He found the Gannets occupying the whole northern half of the summit as well as many ledges along the sides and in numbers that are almost incredible. He estimated the number on the summit at fifty thousand pairs, with about half as many more on the ledges. His description is graphic in the extreme.

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