60 THE GANNET 



Robert Drane, in the " Transactions of the Cardiff Nat. 

 Soc." (1890-1, continued 1893-4), and I am indebted to the 

 author for supplementing it with further particulars. 

 Writing under date of August 3rd, 1903, he says : " I have 

 visited the island three times within the last ten years. 

 . . . On one of my visits I found one of the three Gannet 

 colonies there quite deserted in the height of the breeding 

 season, while that next it, say 400 yards away, was in full 

 swing. Every nest was deserted, and in ruins, although of 

 that season's occupation. . . . Epidemic disease suggests itself 

 as a reason."* The late Mr. E. T. Booth ascertained, from 

 watching some Gannets which bred in confinement; that both 

 sexes take part in the labours of incubation, taking turns to 

 sit on the eggs : that that was so was also believed in the 

 seventeenth century by Martin Martin, to whom the islanders 

 of St. Kilda had communicated it, but Mr. Drane has 

 gone a step further in proving that both male and female 

 feed the young. On one occasion a Gannet fed its downy 

 offspring in his presence, then brooding it, when a second 

 Gannet came and fed the same young one,t after displacing 

 what was presumably its other parent {I.e., p. 60). 



* Mr. Drane remarks, " It is certain tliat the Manx Shearwater dies in 

 autumn from some not obvious cause. In September, 1908, hundreds lay 

 dead on Skonier island." This may have been due to an epidemic. 



f Mr. Drane writes me that this has happened since on more than one 

 occasion. 



