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Gannets can achieve speeds of 100 km/h (62.13 mph) as they strike the water, enabling them to catch fish at a much greater depth than most airborne birds. [ 5 ] The gannet's supposed capacity for eating large quantities of fish has led to "gannet" becoming a description of somebody with a voracious appetite.
The great skua (Stercorarius skua), sometimes known by the name bonxie in Britain, is a large seabird in the skua family Stercorariidae. It is roughly the size of a herring gull . It mainly eats fish caught at the sea surface or taken from other birds.
The masked booby (Sula dactylatra), also called the masked gannet or the blue-faced booby, is a large seabird of the booby and gannet family, Sulidae. First described by the French naturalist René-Primevère Lesson in 1831, the masked booby is one of six species of booby in the genus Sula. It has a typical sulid body shape, with a long pointed ...
The Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner gave the northern gannet the name Anser bassanus or scoticus in the 16th century, and noted that the Scots called it a solendguse. [4] The former name was also used by the English naturalist Francis Willughby in the 17th century; the species was known to him from a colony in the Firth of Forth and from a stray bird that was found near Coleshill, Warwickshire.
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word Alcatraz was originally applied to the frigatebird; the modification to albatross was perhaps influenced by Latin Albus, meaning "white", in contrast to frigatebirds, which are black. [5] They were once commonly known as goonie birds or gooney birds, particularly those of the North Pacific.
The name is derived from súla, the Old Norse and Icelandic word for the other member of the family Sulidae, the gannet. [ 5 ] The English name booby was possibly based on the Spanish slang term bobo , meaning "stupid", [ 6 ] as these tame birds had a habit of landing on board sailing ships, where they were easily captured and eaten.
Also defined: seabird colony; breeding colony; communal roost; heronries; rookery. A large congregation of individuals of one or more species of bird that nest or roost in proximity at a particular location. Many kinds of birds are known to congregate in groups of varying size; a congregation of nesting birds is called a breeding colony.
The genus Fulmarus was introduced in 1826 by the English naturalist James Stephens. [1] The name comes from the Old Norse Fúlmár meaning "foul-mew" or "foul-gull" because of the birds' habit of ejecting a foul-smelling oil. [2] The type species was designated by George Gray in 1855 as the northern fulmar. [3] [4]