352 AN-NUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



years old. However, we may have to wait some time to get longevity 

 records of the gannets — if we are to believe one writer (10) who, from 

 an examination of the ovaries of a shot gannet, considered that it had 

 laid 150 eggs. A gannet, of course, only lays one egg a year, so this 

 bird, if we add the years of its adolescence to this total, would be well 

 over 150 years old ! However, in this instance the circumstantial 

 evidence was not conclusive. 



If we can only continue our ringing work in the years ahead we may 

 be able to answer definitely another much-disputed question, that is, 

 the age of the gannet when it first breeds. Ringing should eventually 

 prove this, if we are lucky enough to catch an adult at Grassholra 

 which was marked by us as a nestling there. 



I have spoken of ringing large numbers, even thousands, of sea 

 birds, and it may be wondered how it is possible for one person to 

 do this and keep account of so many individual birds from year 

 to year. It certainly would be difficult for one person to do this. 

 When I began this study of the individual sea bird I had only my 

 wife's help, and very valuable this was. But we should scarcely have 

 been able to carry on this work as well as our normal duties had not 

 we received some encouragement from outside, an encouragement 

 which we were most grateful to have. In the last few years more 

 students have come along, until a voluntary organization has grown 

 under the name of Skokholm Bird Observatory. It is now so organ- 

 ized as to permit us to endeavor to ring every breeding bird on Skok- 

 holm, from a rock pipit to a gull, and to the gannets of Grassholm. 

 We also catch many migratory birds which use the island as a tem- 

 porary resting place. For instance, we ringed this year over 6,000 

 birds of 61 species. This is a figure comparable with figures achieved 

 by subsidized observatories in foreign countries. In Germany and 

 Italy and the United States ornithological w^ork of this nature is rec- 

 ognized officially as having an educational and scientific value, and 

 it is blessed with the practical support of the government concerned. 

 Here in Britain ornithology outside of museums depends entirely on 

 voluntary support. So that the running of an observatory on a re- 

 mote island is not without its anxieties in more than one direction. 

 Rings at three farthings each add up to a considerable figure in 

 1 year; there is a large amount of clerical work in the recording and 

 card indexing of thousands of individual ringed birds, and there is 

 even the danger that some of the vast amount of information gained 

 will be buried for lack of time and volunteers to sort, collate, and 

 publish it. 



Nevertheless, this voluntary organization is being carried on for 

 the present and is about to issue its third modest annual report (11). 

 It is also proposed to publish in due course further papers of a scien- 



