94 SEA-BIRDS 



eggs; thus i,ioo adult gannets were taken in a single night in June 

 1847, ^^^ i^ April 1885 (probably before most eggs had been laid) 

 660 were taken in two nights. The crop of young in 1895 ^"^^^ high — 

 3,200; but only 300 young were taken in 1902. This is the last record 

 of the taking of young. On 14 May 1902 the top of Stac Lee was 

 cleared of gannet eggs. 600 adults were caught in the spring of 1910 — 

 the last record we have. St. Kildans thought adult gannets, when 

 arriving fat on the cliffs, and taken in March, were good eating — 

 but not later in the breeding-season. They had a high opinion of the 

 goodness of the eggs.* The "gugas" were held to be excellent, an 

 opinion shared widely in the Lewis (and even in North America, 

 whither salted gugas are sent to Lewisian emigres at Christmas) and 

 by the writers of this book, who have tasted them in Scotland and the 

 Faeroes. 



The Manx shearwater, which nests on Dun and Soay, on a slope 

 of giant talus on Hirta known as the Carn Mor, and probably at the 

 Cambir and other places on Hirta, was not much exploited. Mac- 

 Kenzie (1905) in 1829-43 says the young were relished, and that the 

 eggs and adults were taken; in Dixon's time, in 1884, they were hunted 

 at night; George Murray (unpublished diary) records that on 9 April 

 1887 shearwaters were taken from their burrows with the aid of dogs. 

 By the turn of the century the .St. Kildans were taking shearwaters' 

 eggs for collectors and dealers, but not eating them. 



*The St. Kildans had somewhat different ideas from the rest of the world abou 1 

 the relative palatability of eggs. H. B. Cott (1948, 1949) submitted a large number 

 of the eggs of wild birds to the Panel of Egg Tasters at the Low Temperature Research 

 Station at Cambridge: they found those of the gannet "relatively unpalatable," 

 thus disagreeing with the St. Kildans. But when, in later experiments (1951, 1952) 

 Cott used hedgehogs and rats as tasters he found gannets' eggs second only in a 

 hierarchy of many species! Certainly the St. Kildans valued gannets' eggs to the 

 extent of making for years annual expeditions in April and May, involving the 

 sensational climbs of Boreray and Stac an Armin, to gather them. 



In the eighteenth century, at least, no gannet eggs were taken on Stac Lee, which 

 was left to produce young. These young could then be cropped before those derived 

 from replacement-eggs on the other rocks. 



Martin has an amusing passage about the impact of the gannet's egg on the 

 outsiders: "The eggs are found to be of an astringent and windy quality to strangers, 

 but, it seems, are not so to the inhabitants, who are used to eat them from the nest. 

 Our men upon their arrival eating greedily of them become costive and feverish; 

 some had the hemorrhoid veins swelled. . . . They preserve their eggs commonly 

 in their stone pyramids [cletts], scattering the burnt ashes of turf under and about 

 them, to defend them from the air, dryness being their[only preservative, and moisture 

 their corruption; they preserve them six, seven or eight months, as above said; 

 and then they become appetizing and loosening, especially those that begin to turn." 



