300 GANDER— GANNET 



in one of its varied stages of plumage ; but it has since been used, 

 especially by American Avriters, indiscriminately for several Sand- 

 pipers. 



GANDER (Anglo-Saxon, Gandra), the male Goose, 



GANNET (Anglo-Saxon, Gemot) or Solan Goose,^ the Pelecanus 

 bassanus of Linnaeus and the Sula bassana of modern ornithologists, 

 a large sea-fowl long known as a numerous visitor, for the purpose 

 of breeding, to the Bass Rock at the entrance of the Firth of Forth, 

 and to certain other islands off the coast of Britain, of which four 

 are in Scottish waters — namely, Ailsa Ci"aig, at the mouth of the 

 Firth of Clyde ; the group known collectively as St. Kilda ; ^ 

 North Barra or Sulisgeir (otherwise Suleskerry), some 40 miles 

 north of the Butt of Lewis ; and the Stack,^ about the same distance 

 westward of Stromness. It appears also to have two Irish stations, 

 the Skellig Islands off the coast of Kerry, and the Bull Rock off that 

 of Cork,* and it resorts besides to Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel 

 — its only English breeding-place, though in Wales a considerable 

 settlement occupies Grassholm, off the coast of Pembrokeshire.^ 



^ The phrase ganotes hied (Gannet's bath), a periphrasis for the sea, occurs in 

 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in reference to events which took place 975 a.d., as 

 pointed out by Prof. R. 0. Cunningham, whose learned treatise on this bird 

 {Ibis, 1866, pp. 1-23) nearly exhausts all that could then be said of its history 

 and habits. The name, like Gander and Goose in English and German Gans, is 

 from an old base gan, which also supplied the Greek xv", and the Latin anser. 

 Solan is no doubt from the Scandinavian Sula, whatever that may mean. 



Prof. Cunningham {ut supr. p. 15) noticed the wonderful mistake of Robert 

 Browning, which surpasses the licence ordinarily taken on any subject, save 

 natural history, by poets. In Paracelsus (part iii.) " we find Festus referring to 

 his son Aureole's glee when some stray Gannet builds amid the birch trees by 

 the lake of Geneva ! " 



2 Gannets frequent Rockall in the breeding-season, as Basil Hall, in his well- 

 known account of that distant rock, states, and as the late Mr. Gwj'n Jeffrey told 

 me, but whether they breed there is not known. 



^ Cruising round this place in June 1890, my companions and I remarked the 

 large proportion (compared with what we had seen elsewhere) the birds which 

 had not attained their full plumage bore to those perfectly adult. The most likely 

 explanation of the fact seems to be that, the station being so rarely visited and 

 its inhabitants so free from molestation, a greater number of young would yearly 

 grow up ; and I was glad to find afterwards that this way of accounting for it is 

 thought to be right by Mr. Harvie-Brown, whose experience is far greater than 

 that of any one else [cf. Buckley and Harvie-Brown, Vertcbr. Fauna of Orkney, 

 p. 160). 



■* This last seems to have been but recently colonized. Whether it ever bred 

 upon the Stags of Broadhaven, off the coast of Mayo, as has been stated, is 

 doubtful (r/. Barrington and Ussher, Zool. 1884, pp. 473-481). 



^ The history of this settlement is very obscure. Its existence was practically 

 unknown to ornithologists until 1890, when a wanton massacre of its inhabitants 



