First, they were bright white dots moving in the distance between sea and sky. Then, as I reached the end of the land at the cliff’s edge, the gannets were everywhere. From eyeline to the waterline six hundred feet below, huge birds filled all the available space.
They followed invisible contours through the air in every direction and on every horizontal plane. Somehow, silently, they knew to steer to avoid each other, their black-tipped wings never touching. Those not in flight were sitting on every piece of cliff with room to land.
They were lined up on ledges, one bird deep, and the flatter patches of scree were studded in nests, always spaced a sharp beak’s biting distance apart. If someone told me this was all the gannets there are, every last one of them, coming to nest on these very cliffs, I might easily have believed it. But other colonies exist on both sides of the Atlantic, some even bigger than this one, and all of them in places where the surrounding ocean contains enough prolific life and food to sustain so many parents and hungry chicks.
Gannets dive from great heights to hunt beneath the surface, folding their wings back and piercing the water with their arrowlike heads. Air sacs under their skin, like a subdermal cloak of bubble wrap, protect their bodies from the impact of hundred-foot dives. The ammoniacal tang of guano that wafted from the colony told me about the ocean’s immense productivity and all the fish they’ve been catching.
I came to the ga.