Why Scotland is a great place to be a gannet, the ultimate seabird

A gannet in flight near Hermaness, the most northerly point of the island of Unst | Jon Dunn

The past week has seen northern Scotland take a battering in the shape of gales hurled our way straight from the Arctic. It’s not been the weather in which to linger outdoors, but for some it’s no bother whatsoever.

I hurried inside last weekend, tasting salt on my lips, but over the sea outside my Shetland kitchen window, a scatter of gannets continued to quarter high above the seething waves. Unbothered by the wind that set the crockery in the cupboards rattling, their steadfast flight occasionally stalled, their wings folding behind them, their bodies transformed into long white arrows that plunged towards the sea.

Had I been outside, and had the day been calmer, I would have heard the detonation of each bird striking gunmetal water. Instead, I watched each in silence bob back to the surface, pause a moment as if to reflect, then run awkwardly along the water before transforming once more into a master of the racing sky.

Gannets display courtship behaviour | Jon Dunn

The Marlene Dietrich of seabirds

Ask a visitor to think of a seabird here in Scotland, and they’ll probably turn straight to puffins. They’re the obvious choice, the pin-up of the British seabirds, all pretty beak and doleful eyes, winningly ridiculous as they strut their stuff. They’re wholesome, widely loved, showered with plaudits.

But ask anyone who lives around the Scottish coast, and they’ll surely mention the gannets. Gannets are edgier. They’re the Marlene Dietrich to the puffins’ Doris Day. Gannets, when all is said and done, are cooler by far than puffins.

Gannets have undeniable presence, the largest of all our breeding seabirds, and are unmistakeable – their wingspan approaches two metres, their bodies snow-white but for a dusting of cadmium yellow on their heads, and their wingtips jet black. Their beaks are long, thick daggers the better for piercing the sea at the culmination of a feeding dive, and their eyes are a shade of topaz as cold as the fish-rich waters in which they hunt.

50mph dives into the sea

And they’re not just a pretty face. Gannets are the ultimate seabird, evolution’s finest work creating a bird sublimely adapted to hunting fish in the most demanding of marine environments. They’re travelling at over 50mph when they hit the water in a feeding dive, an impact that drives them some 15 metres beneath the surface of the sea, where they use their large feet and wings to manoeuvre under water to catch fish.

Muscles in their necks stiffen, locking their vertebrae in place before impact with the water. A spongy bone plate behind their beak acts as a shock absorber, while air sacs beneath their skin cushion their bodies. Membranes flick over their eyes to protect them, while their nostrils are shielded within their beaks, ensuring no seawater is forced inside when they plunge into the sea. During the breeding season, an adult bird may think nothing of flying 200 miles from the gannetry in which its hungry chick awaits in search of food.

Gannets are able to fly long distances and dive deep underwater in search of food | Jon Dunn

These are truly wonderful creatures, birds of extremes. We’ve lived with them as our liminal neighbours in coastal communities for many centuries. We couldn’t fail to notice them – indeed, in the 1,000-year-old epic poem Beowulf, the hero refers to the sea as the “ganotes bæth”, or gannet’s bath. Even then, gannets were a metaphor for a heroic creature so at ease with its marine home it treated it with an easy contempt, the terrifying sea reduced to a mere bath.

‘Highland goose’

They nest on our coastal fringes, either on offshore holms or towering cliffs, their breeding colonies yammering, noisy gatherings of territorial adults, and clamorous hungry youngsters. They’re not easy, readily accessible places upon which for humankind to tread, but the archaeological records tells us that our relationship with them was never entirely passive – gannet bones have been found in Viking and medieval middens around the Scottish coast, suggesting they were considered a valuable food source in those communities, worth risking one’s life working with a small boat in rocky waters, or in climbing slippery cliffs.

Even as recently as the Second World War, gannets were harvested for sale in London, their flesh – in less lean and hungry times disdainfully said to taste like a cross between old fish and leather – being marketed as ‘Highland Goose’.

Our predations upon them have had little impact, and have dwindled to almost nothing these days while their numbers have increased in Britain as a whole, and in Scotland in particular. The RSPB estimate that 40 per cent of the world population of gannets call Scotland home. We’re a good place to be a gannet.

Entangled in old fishing gear

In these trying times of biodiversity crisis, we’re growing inured to learning that our wildlife is in trouble. However, Birdlife International, the organisation tasked with monitoring global bird populations, provide cautious grounds for optimism. Gannets are classified as being of “least concern”, a status that reflects their large and stable population.

Maybe that status masks a wider truth. Gannets naturally range so widely in search of food, and are such supreme hunters of fish – perhaps they are uniquely physically blessed to weather the environmental storm that’s unfolding around them. In these circumstances, generalists might prosper when specialists struggle. Better to be a gannet, able to range widely, dive deep, and consume whatever it can catch, than an Arctic tern or a kittiwake, confined to feeding at the surface and close to their breeding colonies.

That’s not to say that gannets are untouched by the modern world. Many of their nests nowadays incorporate ghost gear from the fishing industry in place of scraps of seaweed. Entanglement, for adults and chicks alike, is a very real danger. And that is nothing compared to the impact of avian influenza – the gannetries in 2022 were charnel houses, places of mass death instead of burgeoning life. The RSPB estimate 25 per cent of our gannets were lost.

In death, as in life, gannets do everything by extremes.

Jon Dunn’s latest book is the Carnegie Medal Prize longlisted The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds (Bloomsbury)