Wales: 100,000 Gannets. Heaven.

Gannets are so beautiful, I just can't get enough of them.  Here there are about 100,000 on a refuge in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales.  We cannot go on the island but there are boats that take us out and circle the island and seas.  Heaven to me.

The coast of Wales is wild and cliffy, thus great for seabirds.  Even better, it is facing the Irish Sea, a little more protected than some areas of Ireland and Scotland.  So seabirds thrive, especially on islands where rats and foxes cannot get their eggs.  Royal Society for Protection of Birds (RSPB) has several refuges and bird observatories both on the islands and mainland.

I took a boat trip to the farthest-out island, Grassholm, which is fully protected and home to about 100,000 gannets as well as puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes and other seabirds.  At this time of year, mainly gannets are remaining on land; the others are already feeding at sea. So we went further out to a shoal with a light house that seems to be about half way to Ireland--20+ miles out from shore.  The island is the nesting site but the seas and shoals are the feeding grounds where we saw all the seabirds feeding. Schools of porpoises with their half-size young were feeding and following our boat.

Gannets mature in 3 years , so there are breeding adults, non-breeding youth and babies present in the colonies.  The non-breeding juveniles wander all over but spend time in their own birth colony and other colonies.  (Does this sound a bit like human teens?)  

The English Channel is the southern end of their breeding range; northern Norway, the northern end of the range.  They stay until about October and winter in Spain, the Mediterranean and as far south as Senegal.

From our boat; many of the gannets have left but the island still looks like snow.

More pictures

More pics of gannets on Grassholm.  I just love them so decided to leave them where I could look from time to time.  Maybe you will enjoy too.

Some photos by RSPB.  Most by me. I am getting better with my little phone camera.