THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF PERCE- 45 



Gannets are not found everywhere. Their only breeding- 

 places in numbers, if the small breeding-ground near Grand 

 Manan has been broken up, are in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, 

 although they not infrequently visit the coast of Maine, where 

 they can be easily distinguished from gulls by their shape and 

 habits. Their bold and beautiful action on the wing at once 

 calls attention to them, as do their habits of flying in lines and 

 plunging from the wing. Larger, longer-winged than a gull, 

 longer-necked and longer-billed, with a longer tail, they more 

 resemble gigantic terns in their graceful flight and easy evolu- 

 tions on the wing. A most beautiful, bold, fierce bird is our 

 great gannet, with his cold, white eye, and his taper, knife- 

 edged bill that bites, not " like a dog," as Cartier says, but a 

 great deal worse, cutting to the bone. A terrible weapon it is 

 against man or fish, yet sometimes it brings the gannet to 

 grief. It used to be the custom in the Bay of Gaspe to fasten 

 a dead fish to a floating shingle or bit of driftwood just large 

 enough to buoy him. The gannets, seeing the fish, and diving 

 like an arrow, often from a great height, would spear not only 

 the fish, but the board as well, and become victims to their too 

 headlong speed. 



It is the gannet's peculiar way of diving that makes such a 

 capture possible. Most diving birds, if they wish to dive deejD, 

 spring from the water and take a header exactly as a boy 

 would do. The loon and the cormorant dive in this way. 

 The gull fishes from the wing without diving. But the tern 

 and gannet dive with a splash. The gannet is incomparably 

 the bolder and more expert of the two. He hunts on the wing 

 at all distances above the water, but oftenest at seventy-five 

 or a hundred feet above the surface, if the fish are swimming 

 deep, flying in straggling flocks. 



When a fish is seen the gannet draws in his wings till they 



