440 THE GANNET 



fishing in the bay, and on this afternoon, owing to there 

 being no wind, the breakers rolled them on to the shore 

 by hundreds, some dead but a great many alive. Whitesand 

 Bay was soon a scene of animation, as the fishermen caught 

 a great many ; one man getting a cartload. Most of them 

 were adult birds." Nobody at The Land's End remembered 

 such a thing happening before,* nor has it, says Mr. Welch, 

 writing to me in 1911, happened since, to his knowledge. 

 Mr. Welch attributes the disaster to there having been a 

 gale which dropped to no wind at all, but left a 

 tremendous sea running. 



Starved by Bough Weather. — Guillemots and Razorbills, 

 and Gannets too sometimes, are reduced to starvation 

 by continuous rough weather, which naturally has the effect 

 of driving the fish (their only means of subsistence) into 

 deep water, or else it so discolours the sea that they can 

 not discern them. Every British ornithologist who has 

 walked his native shores, must have occasionally come 

 across the carcass of a Gannet at or above high-tide mark, 

 the reason of whose demise was attributable to these causes. 

 We may guess, with some measure of certainty, that it 

 was to a like starvation, consequent on rough weather, 

 that a great mortality on the French side of the Enghsh 



*" Field," 1894, p. 931 ; and "The Land's End," by W. H. Hudson 

 (1908), p. 86. 



