394 
THE GANNET. 
fatal to tlie starving Cormorants, we might have added, that 
in the way of the Gannet they throw no impediment; 
buoyant as a bladder, no sea can overwhelm him ; there he 
floats, if so it pleases him, lighter than a cork, on the sum- 
mit of the most angry waves, without let or hindrance. On 
their airy, spreading pinions too, they can, in case of disap- 
pointment in one place, transport themselves, in an incredibly 
short time, to another. The inhabitants of St. Kilda assert, 
that they occasionally go a hundred miles or more for the 
purpose of fishing ; a fact, they say, proved by finding in 
their nests, hooks of English manufacture, sticking in fish 
bones. # 
Their nests are usually placed on the ledges of apparently 
inaccessible rocks, in which two eggs only are, for the most 
part, laid; hut, breeding as they do, on so many of the 
desolate rocks of the northern shores, the number produced is 
incredible, and in many parts becomes a source of considerable 
profit to those who catch them. Thus, Mr. Landt, in his 
account of some islands near the Eeroes, says, “ The old ones 
are caught in the middle of April, when they have built their 
nests, but before they have laid their eggs. The peasants 
steal upon them in the night-time, or when it is dark, in the 
places where they sit and sleep, and seize them by griping 
them in a peculiar manner, which prevents them from 
emitting any cry ; for if they are suffered to make a noise, all 
the rest would awaken and take themselves to flight. In 
the course of a season, those who are successful will catch, of 
old and young ones, about four hundred brace.” 
As we shall have occasion to speak of the Gannet again, 
in giving a general account of the modes of catching the 
various sea-birds that are found upon our shores, we shall, 
for the present, take our leave of it, as well as of the two last 
divisions of this Table, the Phaetons (see page 79), or Tropic- 
Birds, and Anhingas, or Darters, both comparatively little 
known, and inhabitants of remote regions, the former, from 
its name, being found almost invariably within the tropics, 
Martin’s Kilda . 
