452 THE GANNET 



is a tradition which goes back to 1521, when John Major 

 wrote : " These birds are very long-lived — a fact which the 

 inhabitants have proved by marks upon certain of them."* 

 Tradition has generally truth in it, and the memory of 

 these long-lived Gannets remained in people's minds. The 

 same information about them was given to P. J. Selby 

 when he visited the Bass Rock in 1825,t and to me very 

 much later than that. I found Mr. Laidlaw, the light- 

 house-keeper, as well as Mr. R. Kirkpatrick, the lessee, 

 quite ready to discuss the matter. The latter 's grand- 

 father used to maintain that it had been proved that 

 Gannets live a long time, and that in one instance at any 

 rate he believed he could certify to a Gannet's having 

 reached the age of eighty. It was a bird which was 

 long known by a structural peculiarity, very likely a 

 deformed beak, but what it was which made it a marked 

 bird Mr. Kirkpatrick has now forgotten.J§ 



* See p. 176. f " British Ornithology," II., p. 457. 



J I am indebted to Mr. C. Kirk for a pliotograph of a young Gannet, 

 the beak of which, or rather its ujjper mandible, twists upwards. 

 Mr. Eagle Clarke informs me that it is now in the Edinburgh Museum. 

 Thompson mentions one in which the mandibles crossed ("Birds of 

 Ireland," III., jd. 257). Either of these deformities would have been 

 oonspicuous at a considerable distance. 



§ We are not without statistics as to the age of Pelicans, which are 

 not far removed from the Gannet, and what applies to one may apply to 

 the other. Now these have often been kept in confinement for twenty 

 or thirty years. In 1007, a Pelecanus onocrotalus was certified by Dr. J. 

 Biittikofer, to have reached the age of fifty-one and a half ("Zoologist," 

 1911, p. 279). There is, or wa^ not long ago, a Pelican of thirty -two 

 living in the Zoological Gardens, at London. 



