'Largest indigenous seabird of North Atlantic; long neck and wedge-shaped tail impart distinctive jizz.'

Whatever 'jizz' is?!

I just looked up gannets in the book - Seabirds of the World - as I know very little about birds and bird watching, and now I have learned a new word. Unfortunately I can't look it up as the only decent dictionary onboard always seems to disappear from the library into peoples' cabins (which makes for heated moments in scrabble games when contentious words go to a majority vote of acceptability).

But anyway, my blog is about gannets, not scrabble. As I said, I'm not a natural twitcher, but I do love gannets. During the course of this campaign and others, I have spent many hours sat in inflatables; by day and by night, in rough seas and in smooth, in fair weather and foul, with flasks of hot chocolate and without, and always invariably my mood is lifted whenever the gannets come.

There is something so elegant about them; the way they glide, sometimes singly, sometimes in formation, low over the water. Or the slow beat of their long, slender wings when they do try to gain altitude. Fulmars are pretty cool too with their unfeasibly close to the surface of the water type glide. But fulmars are short and stubby, and a bit comedic with their stiff-winged flap. And they don't have the bright yellow head and the heavily made up eyes of the gannet that makes them so distinctive. No jizz, maybe?

But the thing that really makes the gannet so supremo over boring gulls and all the rest, is its incredible wing dislocating diving antics. This is really an incredible sight to witness close-up, as is often the case when we are following trawlers that are hauling their nets, full with caught fish. They kind of swoop in amongst the gulls, their eyes alert to the underwater signs of fish and food, and then they stall, mid-air, by splaying their tail feathers and using their wings as brakes.

And then the most amazing thing. They dive head first into the water with incredible speed, dislocating their wings in order to become more streamlined and break the surface of the sea with barely a splash. When you are in the middle of a group that is feeding like this, it's like yellow, black and white missiles hitting the water all around you.

The WDCS scientist onboard told me that they end up going blind due to the force of hitting the water with their eyes open, which seems to me a cruel twist by mother nature.

Still, jizz is a good scrabble word - if I can get it past the other players!

Kate, Photographer