Don’t bank on it, 1

Having seen a rosefinch at Fife Ness on Tuesday, a trip to the Isle of May on Wednesday seemed a good bet.

The May is famous for its seabirds,  and the studies of them which have been carried out there, and as a place for seeing migrants.  Just as Fife Ness reaches out to tired migrants heading to Britain from continental Europe, the Isle of May sits out at the entrance to the Firth of Forth shouting ‘land here!’ at migrant birds.

After seeing a couple of attractive Fife coastal towns, Pittenween and Elie, we parked in another, Anstruther, and handed over our fare to an attractive dark-haired young lady with white teeth who cheerfully took the Royal Bank of Scotland notes that I had just got out of a hole in the wall.  Since I seem to own much of RBS these days I’ll be checking my bank statement to see whether I got a discount of a few quid when I took out £100.

The May Princess headed out of Anstruther harbour in the sun and I was impressed when the crew pointed out a young puffin a little offshore after we headed out into the calm waters of the Firth of Forth.  A few weeks earlier and we would have seen many of these birds which were studied by Mike Harris for many years on the Isle of May but this proved to be the only one we saw on the trip.

There had been several recent sightings of minke whales on the journey out to the island, I wonder whether MARINElife knows about them, but that was another thing of which we saw none.

Gannets streamed past, heading to and from the other large island near the entrance to the Firth of Forth, the Bass Rock.  Just as the Isle of May is ‘puffin city’, the Bass Rock, a domed lump of an island, is ‘gannet city’.  The French call gannets fou de bassans – mad birds of the Bass rock – and the scientific specific name of the gannet, bassana, also recognises the historic and current importance of this island colony for them.  Although there are bigger colonies in the West of Scotland the Bass is one of the largest gannet colonies in the world, and this is a species whose population is mostly concentrated in the UK – around 70% of the world’s gannets nest in the UK.  And so, that white-topped island, white because of its gannets sitting there and white when they are gone because of the droppings they leave, is a site of global importance for this species.

Mad, the gannets might be, presumably the French name comes from their tameness on land (or bravery! – no rude comments about French courage here, please) as they will sit fairly tight at the approach of a person, and no doubt the French have developed a string of gannet recipes as a result.  Although they would have to be Breton recipes, gannet crepes with a splash of cidre?, as the Sept Isles off the north Brittany coast is the only, I think, French gannet colony.

Mad they may be to sit tight on their nests, but the streams of gannets passed close enough to our boat to notice that gannets have a bit of a staring eye about them, maybe that’s why they are labelled mad?  The adults are black and white – mostly white with black wing tips, although I always think that it is appropriate that their cigar-shaped bodies are topped off with yellowish heads looking as though they are nicotine-stained.  Younger gannets pass by in plumage that goes from dark in the youngest birds to various piebald combinations in older birds.  It takes a few years, up to five, for a bird to leave the nest as a fledgling and make its own as an adult.

Gannets would have been a great investment over the years – I wish there had been a gannet index in which to pile money rather than a FTSE index.  Throughout my life, and yours, gannet numbers have increased thanks to protection of their mad colonies and they seem to have benefitted from the practice of discarding unlandable fish at sea too.  But their madness is demonstrated in how they catch their prey too, and that’s where that streamlined head and body come in.  When a gannet discovers a shoal of edible fish near the surface it plunges into the water from a great height, beak first.

Sitting on shore you can often spot gannets by their brilliant white plumage at some distance, and if a flock is fishing you also see the white splashes as gannet after gannet dives from a height of around 100 feet into the water at speeds which are claimed to be up to 100mph ( suspiciously round numbers, methinks) in pursuit of tasty herring, mackerel or sandeels.  As they enter the water the gannets fold their wings back against the body to be extra streamlined as they enter the water.  Catching your food by diving head-first into a shoal of fish at 100mph is quite a skill – aren’t birds amazing?

I’ll pick up the journey to the Isle of May and back tomorrow…

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