Summer is generally the season for seabirds on Scilly- the intense sunshine highlights the vivid colours of the puffin’s bill, the Manx shearwaters come skimming back across the waves from the Patagonian Shelf and all the birds are in full, frantic throttle for the breeding season. Boatloads of tourists rightly shell out their cash to go out on tripper boats bristling with binoculars and my job (Seabird officer) gains a kind of maniac momentum and energy as I desperately try to get all my surveys done before the birds depart. It’s wonderful. 

Now, with the islands settling gently into their winter quiet as the last of the autumnal migration of birdwatchers depart, there are different joys to be had.

You do see northern gannets (Morus bassanus) around the islands in the summer, notably in late summer when they can form part of the feeding frenzies. Those dense concentrations of movement and life in which birds, cetaceans, dolphins and tuna assemble to hunt balls of bait fish. However, during the summer they are most often seen flying high above the water on their way to or from a hunt, a backdrop to the busy drama of the flocks of smaller seabirds. In the winter the gannets take center stage, and what a main act they are!  

An adult gannet is an awesomely beautiful sight - glowing ivory white except for the pitch black tips of its stiletto knife wings and the grey of its dagger sharp bill, as it swoops, banks sharply up and plunges into the slatey winter sea, sending a plume of spray up to catch the light like a burst of flame.  

All seabirds are carnivorous but of all the birds that pursue marine creatures around our coast, a gannet on the wing, scanning the water for a target, swooping low over the waves then catching the wind back up to get a good vantage point, is the only species that is instinctively recognized by something deep in my brain as a predator on the hunt.

The Gannets’ dive is a magnificent feat of evolutionary engineering. They can dive from 30m in the air, hitting the water at speeds of up to 60mph and plunging down to 14m below the surface. To cope with the stresses produced by this, they have a number of unique physical characteristics;  their nostrils open inside of their mouths to prevent water from being forced up them (imagine if your nostrils were located on the roof of your mouth- you’d never need to worry about getting water up your nose again!), they have a system of air sacs located around their head and neck that act as shock absorbers, and their eyes are located on the front of their face giving them superb binocular vision and depth perception (and a savagely intimidating stare). 

If you needed another reason to think that gannets are the most metal of our seabirds, here it is; when a gannet survives a bout of bird flu, its eyes can turn from the usual icy blue to a flat jet black like something out of a horror movie.  

The UK is home to around 56% of the world’s northern gannet population, and the majority of that 56% is to be found in breeding season in the massive Scottish gannetries. They don’t actually breed on Scilly- the individuals we see around Scilly are mainly from the Welsh colony of Grassholm, drawn to Scilly as a rich source of fish and other prey. If you take a walk along the coast path in winter you are almost guaranteed to see these powerful birds.  

 As members of the Sulidae family, gannets are unique among British seabirds. They are related to tropical boobies which do occasionally also stray into the Scillonian neighborhood - notably in 2023 when, in a gift to twitchers, tour boat operators and headline writers alike, two different Booby species alighted on Bishop’s Rock Lighthouse.  

Of course I miss the hustle and bustle of our summer seabirds, but if you need an emblem of Scillonian winter wildness, you could do worse than to head out into the teeth of an incoming storm (always scanning the sea for the tell-tale spout of a whale of course) and watch the gannets dive.