Podcast Appearances
Yeah, and what's very interesting, Richard, as well is the young ones, like a lot of seabirds, they wander far more than the adults.
And in the winter, a lot of the younger gannets can end up as far south as West Africa, believe it or not.
And many go to the Bay of Biscay for the winter.
But what you find is as the birds mature, they change out of that dirty, dark grey plumage.
And over a period of about four years, they gain the adult plumage.
And as they get older, they don't go as far from where they were born.
I think the term is philopatric, which means they are drawn back to where they were born.
And so when you're an adult then, you don't roam very far from your breeding colony.
And that's exactly what happens as they grow up.
Wander a lot when you're young, a bit like ourselves, and then settle down and don't travel so far.
When they go into the water like that, the speed at which they enter and the gravity sends them down so far, but then they're able to use their big webbed feet and kind of use their wings to go down even further in pursuit of their prey.
And when they pop back up to the surface, it's really like a cork coming up or a beach ball coming up from underwater.
And then they kind of struggle sometimes to take off.
They need a long runway before they can get back into the air.
But later on this morning, we're going to see them with bits of seaweed.
They're doing all that sort of thing.
And unfortunately, we're going to see a lot of those nests full of old fishing nets, greens, yellows and blues.