While researching the Gannet, I find a recent story about a Glasgow man winning an actual gannet-eating competition: small, pickled, baby gannets, or guga, to be knocked back with milk.
On one section of beach between Downderry and Seaton more than 100 birds, including guillemots and gannets, were found dead on Sunday morning.
Not that I was entirely alone: a huge white seabird with black-tipped wings, which I later found out was a gannet, was diving spectacularly into the foaming swell of the sea, searching for a fishy breakfast without much success.
But in doing so, we got to see a gannet dive into the water, landing so close I felt the salty splash on my face.
The track-a-gannet scheme was prompted by the increase in renewable energy projects planned for the Channel, with concerns that schemes such as the Rampion windfarm off the coast of Brighton could have direct impacts on birds such as gannets.
To dive into water from 100 feet may not be lethal for a gannet, but it would, or should, get a fearful migraine.
A bionic gannet was developed based on the analysis of the body configuration and skeleton structure and the motion pattern of wings of a gannet in plunge-diving.
There were rumours of a gannet, but as some of you will know, I have a history with gannets and tried to avoid it.
It turns out to be a gannet, a bird whose habitat is the far north.
(Long-term readers will remember that I was scarred, perhaps forever, by a dreadful succession of gannet-carrying, gannet-death and gannet-burial-at-sea mishaps which mightily amused the lovely town of Ullapool but which will mean I am never again able to look a gannet in its mad-blue eyes without flinching and, at the very least, offering up a herring as a belated apology).
