352 



CORMORANT GROUP 



made by means of ropes. The filth and smell are noisome in the 

 extreme ; and the sitting birds hiss fiercely at the intruder, and are 

 with difficulty forced to desert their charges. Young gannets form a 

 valuable harvest to the peasants living in the vicinity of their breeding- 

 place ; the "harvest" taking place in August. In North Burra 

 between two and three thousand birds used to be taken in a season, 

 and from fifteen hundred to a couple of thousand on the Bass, where, 

 however, the "catch" has now fallen to something like eight hundred. 



Formerly the young birds 

 from the Bass were eaten ; 

 but their main use is now 

 for oil and feathers. When 

 cleaned from its chalky coat 

 and filth, the single egg, 

 which measures from rather 

 less than 3 to 3^ inches in 

 length, is pale bluish in 

 colour. Incubation lasts 

 about forty days. 



Gannets take their prey, 

 not by diving in cormorant- 

 fashion, but by plunging 

 straight down upon them 

 from a considerable height ; 

 herrings and pilchards form- 

 ing their favourite food. The 

 practice of capturing these 

 birds by fixing oneof thcsefish 

 on a board which is set adrift, 

 is almost as old as histor}'. 

 From the middle of the seventeenth century up to the present day 

 occasional statements of the capture of jjelicans in the British Islands 

 have been published (one such record having been made in 1 905). 

 There is, however, little doubt that all such instances refer to birds 

 escaped from captivity ; and there is no evidence that pelicans have 

 ever been natives of this country since the prehistoric ei)och, from 

 dcjiosits of which date in Cambridgeshire and Somersetshire their 

 remains have been recorded. 



HE ROWLAND 



RO &TUO1O5 



IMM.VrUKK fJANNKT. 



