In Search Of A New Home

If Marga the gannet had ever been to sea and looked back at Gannet Rock she could have seen that only a few ledges were still occupied by the birds. The nests and the chalky white of the guano still lined the cliffs all around the island—many miles of ledges that had once held, some say, ten thousand families of gannets. In fifty years of persecution by the No-wings that number had fallen to two hundred. It may seem strange that the gannets had not long ago left the scene of their danger. But habit and reverence for the past is stronger in a gannet, who thinks little but acts swiftly and mostly by instinct, than in a Chinese mandarin.

Marga's ancestors for three thousand years had lived and died upon Lundy Island, and it was as natural for them to come hack from their wide winter roving to this summer breeding place as it was for them to eat fish. To change their home was almost as unthinkable as to change their diet. By the same instinct no gannet ever flies across land if he can help it, or swallows a gurnard except by mistake, or changes its mate unless death robs it of its first-love. Yet latterly the raids upon Gannet Rock by the No-wings had been so numerous, the little band of birds was diminished, that the Old Ones had put their heads together for a gabble, and now at last they meditated flight—desertion.

As soon as the young could fly the flock would abandon Lundy Island and join another gannetry. Some were for going to Grasholm in Wales, some to Ailsa Rock in the Firth of Clyde. Voices were raised in favor of St. Kilda, The Stack, and The Bass Rock in Scotland, some favored Skellig and The Bull, that rock of roaring waters, in Ireland; there were even stout hearts that talked of the Faroes and Sulisgeir in the North Sea, or the three great gannetries of Iceland. Those were all the places where gannets ever nested, so far as the Old Ones knew, though once a great wind had blown a gannet all the way from Canada, who had told them of bird rocks in the New World.

It was eating humble pie for the ancient inhabitants of Lundy Island to go to any other gannetry and confess themselves defeated. They would have to beg a little perching room, or if they could not get it amicably, they would have to fight for it, and their numbers were already reduced to a pitiful little band. But things had come to a desperate pass. The lighthouses on The Bass Rock and Grasholm were considered too menacing; the gannets on The Bull were fierce and inhospitable ; St. Kilda, the greatest gannetry in the world, was so overcrowded there was scarce room for one more webbed foot. So Ailsa Craig was chosen for the new, far home.

By: davidbunch

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