Gannet

Lore & Background

Their supposed capacity for eating large quantities of fish has led to 'gannet' becoming a description of someone with a voracious appetite. Gannets are colonial breeders on islands and coasts, normally laying one chalky-blue egg. They lack brood patches and use their webbed feet to warm the eggs. They reach maturity around 5 years of age. First-year birds are completely black, and subsequent subadult plumages show increasing amounts of white. The most important nesting ground for northern gannets is the United Kingdom, with about two-thirds of the world's population, mainly in Scotland including the Shetland Isles. Other important breeding sites include Sulasgeir, St Kilda, Grassholm, Bempton Cliffs, Sceilig Bheag, Cape St Mary's, and Bonaventure Island.

Reader's Guide

Gannets are significant as the largest seabirds in the North Atlantic and as colonial breeders whose populations are concentrated in the United Kingdom. The term 'gannet' has entered common usage in the United Kingdom to describe someone with a voracious appetite. Historically, young gannets were used as a food source, a tradition still practised in Ness, Scotland, where they are called 'guga'. The hunt remains controversial, with debates over exemptions from ordinary seabird protections. The genus Morus is better documented in the fossil record than the related booby genus Sula, though boobies are more numerous today. Most fossil gannets are from the Late Miocene or Pliocene. Notably, gannets are today restricted to temperate oceans, while several prehistoric gannet species had a more equatorial distribution.

Did You Know?

• The genus name Morus comes from Ancient Greek μωρός (moros), meaning 'stupid, foolish', due to the lack of fear shown by breeding gannets and boobies.
• The Spanish species name Alcatraz became the name of the infamous Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
• Gannets have no external nostrils; they are located inside the mouth instead.
• In Scotland, 'guga' is the Gaelic name for gannet chicks, not adult birds.

A Granite Slab in the North Atlantic

Funk Island presents as a small, nearly flat trapezoid of feldspathic granite rising just fourteen metres above the North Atlantic, stretching no more than eight hundred metres in length and three hundred in width. Two roughly parallel fault lines cut across the island in a northwesterly direction, splitting it into three distinct zones. The northeastern quarter is largely bare rock, the central strip carries only scattered vegetation, while the southwestern half—more than half the total land area—is blanketed in grasses, lichens, and mosses. Reaching the island is no small feat. In rough seas the cliffs are impassable, and even in calm conditions only three spots permit a safe landing: Gannet Head at the southwestern tip, Landing Rock just to its north, and a narrow natural shelf called The Bench set into a cliff on the northern face, roughly a metre and a half wide and sloping upward. Off the southwest side, two large rock bunkers are regularly submerged, serving as roosting platforms rather than nesting sites for gannets and other seabirds. Despite the documented history of shipwrecks and lost lives in these waters, the island carries no lighthouse or navigational aid whatsoever.

From Penguin Island to Funk

The name Funk Island is, by one account, a blunt reference to the overwhelming stench that hangs over the rock. Centuries of seabird guano have built up concentrated deposits of nitrate and phosphate, producing what sailors described as an evil odour or vapour. A less unpleasant theory traces the name to a Norse or Icelandic word meaning haycock, a shape the island loosely resembles. Long before "Funk" took hold, the island went by names that celebrated its avian abundance. English and French sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries consistently called it Penguin Island or Island of the Birds—a reference to the great auk, which nested there in numbers reaching tens of thousands. The American Heritage Dictionary even suggests the word "penguin" itself may derive from the Breton phrase penn gwenn, meaning "white head," possibly coined by Breton settlers in the nearby region known as Terra de Bretones.

The Extinction of the Great Auk

The great auk, known in Norse as geirfugl or garefowl, was the island's most vulnerable resident. Flightless and dense in number, it offered an almost effortless harvest to arriving Europeans. In the early sixteenth century, transatlantic fishermen desperate for fresh provisions at the end of long voyages found the auks could be swept up gang planks and into boats with minimal effort. Settlers along the northeast coast made regular trips to kill birds for meat, render oil for lamps, stuff feathers into pillows and mattresses, and collect eggs.

A Living Seabird Engine

Today Funk Island functions as a protected wildlife sanctuary with strictly restricted access. The cold Labrador Current flowing past its shores creates nutrient-rich conditions that sustain dense populations of cold-water fish. Those fish, in turn, anchor one of the most concentrated seabird breeding colonies in the North Atlantic. Among the many species that return each season, the common murre is the most abundant, though gannets and numerous other seabirds also depend on the island and its two offshore rock bunkers. The bunkers, regularly submerged by the sea, serve as roosting platforms rather than nesting sites, giving gannets a resting place between foraging trips. At high tide, waves crash broadly against the cliffs, and in particularly heavy seas they break entirely over the island's low profile. Centuries of bird activity are visible in the thick guano deposits that once gave the island its pungent name. Millions of birds nested here over the ages, and the nitrogen and phosphorus they left behind still shape the thin vegetation clinging to the southwestern grasslands. The island's isolation—some sixty-five kilometres northeast of Musgrave Harbour, Newfoundland—has kept it largely untouched by human development, preserving a dynamic that has operated for millennia.