The Northern Gannets are large white birds with black-tipped long pointed wings and long bills.
Gannets can dive from a height of 30 m, achieving speeds of 100 km/h as they strike the water, enabling them to catch fish much deeper than most airborne birds.
Although they are very agile fliers, they are clumsy in takeoffs and landings.
They mainly eat small fish (2.5-30.5 cm in length) which gather in groups near the surface. Virtually any small fish (roughly 80-90% of the diet) or other small pelagic species (largely squid) will be taken opportunistically. Various cod, smelt and herring species are most frequently taken.
Gannets are colonial breeders on islands and coasts, which normally lay one chalky blue egg. It takes five years for gannets to reach maturity. First-year birds are completely black, and subsequent sub-adult plumages show increasing amounts of white.
The largest colony of this bird, with over 60,000 couples, is found on Bonaventure Island, Quebec.
Gannet pairs may remain together over several seasons. They perform elaborate greeting rituals at the nest, stretching their bills and necks skywards and gently tapping bills together.
They are migratory birds and spend and most of winter at sea, heading further south in the Atlantic, or the Gulf of Mexico.
Immature Gannets spend the first three years of their lives in the Gulf of Mexico before starting to migrate on a yearly basis; for this reason, many of the young birds born on Bonaventure island during the past three years are now terribly exposed to the BP mess.
The adults shown on these pictures left the Gulf of Mexico and headed for Bonaventure island before the onset of the spill so they were complete spared; unfortunately, many of the birds in this colony will be headed for the Gulf of Mexico in October and they now face a very uncertain future, courtesy of BP.
It must be noted that not all the birds found on Bonaventure island migrate to the Gulf of Mexico; a good number of them migrate to the Atlantic coast, from Virginia southward. This split in their wintering destinations may mitigate the casualties that they will suffer during the fall and winter seasons.