PELICANS. 



189 



Being without a gular pouch, it feeds its young by disgorging, and Macgillivray 

 assures us that it never carries fish to the rock where it breeds, in its bill. 



The solan goose breeds in large colonies on small islands and rocks in the North 

 Atlantic Ocean ; for instance, on the Bass Rock in Scotland, hence the specific name. 

 This rookery has been described and depicted so often and elaborately by everybody 

 who ever wrote of the natural history of this bird, that it would be trivial to repeat 



FIG. 91. Sula bassana, gannet. 



it here. Suffice it to say that Macgillivray, in 1831, estimated their number on that 

 celebrated rock to be about twenty thousand, and that Dr. Cunningham, thirty-one 

 years afterwards, found no decrease. Much larger is the colony on Gannet Rock, in 

 the Gulf of Saint Lawrence ; for Dr. Bryant, in describing a visit to that island, says : 

 " Their number on the summit could be very easily and accurately determined by 

 measuring the surface occupied by them ; by a rough computation I made it to be 

 about fifty thousand pairs, and probably half as many more breed on the remaining 



