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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 Australasian gannet (Morus serrator), also known as the Australian gannet or tākapu, is a large seabird of the booby and gannet family, Sulidae.Adults are mostly white, with black flight feathers at the wingtips and lining the trailing edge of the wing.
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 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 word "stearn" was used for these birds in Old English as early as the eighth century, and appears in the poem The Seafarer, written in the ninth century or earlier. Variants such as "tearn" occurred by the eleventh century, although the older form lingered on in Norfolk dialect for several centuries. [ 21 ]
There exists no single definition of which groups, families and species are seabirds, and most definitions are in some way arbitrary. Elizabeth Shreiber and Joanna Burger, two seabird scientists, said, "The one common characteristic that all seabirds share is that they feed in saltwater; but, as seems to be true with any statement in biology, some do not."
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.
The magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens), frigate petrel [2] or man o' war [3] is a seabird of the frigatebird family Fregatidae.With a length of 89–114 centimetres (2 ft 11 in – 3 ft 9 in) and wingspan of 2.17–2.44 m (7 ft 1 in – 8 ft 0 in) it is the largest species of frigatebird.