112 THE GANNET 



guess of an observant man. This great hive of Gannets 

 has never thrown off any colonies that we know of, but 

 on May 25th, 1883, Mr. R. Service found two Gannets' 

 nests on the Big Scaur, one of them containing a broken 

 egg, and he saw the pair of old birds flying close at hand. 

 The Big Scaur is a precipitous rock on the south of 

 Wigtownshire, lying between the Mull of Galloway and 

 Burrow Head, and would be by sea about fifty miles 

 from Ailsa Craig, from where presumably these Gannets 

 came. 



We made no attempt to assess the numbers of the other 

 birds on the Craig, but Mr. Kirk is of opinion that there are 

 quite five times as many Pufhns at Ailsa as there are 

 Gannets, and nearly as many Guillemots, but Mr. Thomson 

 thinks the Puffins are decreasing in numbers, owing to rats. 

 Anyhow there are plenty, and the noise caused by the 

 " whish " of Puffins shooting through the air, as they 

 descend from the upper parts of the Craig with the 

 velocity of a Falcon, is quite alarming to anyone who 

 does not know whence the weird sound originates, often 

 continuing as it does far into the night. We heard several 

 of these Puffins' descents as late as 10.30 p.m., but the 

 Gannets, Mr. Thomson says, are not on the wing at that 

 time of night. 



The whole Craig is a marvel of life, and, given fine weather, 



