THE STORMY PETREL II, A 60-FOOT FISHING and seabird touring boat, steamed away from North Carolina’s Outer Banks on a recent winter morning. Its captain, Brian Patteson, is widely considered the godfather of pelagic birds along the Atlantic Seaboard. He was taking me out to find a transient spot along the continental shelf where Northern Gannets gather. By mid-morning I could see a stark delineation in the water off our bow. On one side, emerald, nutrient-rich water cooled by the Labrador Current flowing south from the Arctic; on the other, the midnight blue of the Gulf Stream, the warm, swift current that originates off the tip of Florida.
This boundary is ever shifting off the Outer Banks—sometimes as close as a few miles from the coast, other times as far as 20. Wherever it is, life teems. As we coasted to a corkscrewing bob above the swells, loggerhead turtles floated by, their heart-shaped shells rolling in the current. Below them circled 20 or so hammerhead sharks.
What brought us here was the spectacle off our starboard side. Hundreds of Northern Gannets jostled for space among 3,000 seabirds. Pelicans and gulls scrummed near two shrimp boats, which puttered along churning up fish. The gannets, meanwhile, hovered 30 or 40 feet overhead, occasionally making their trademark daring dive: hurtling toward the water, then tucking their wings in just above the surface as if they were feathers on the shaft of an arrow.
The gannets’ vocalization reached a fever pitch, alerting their kin in the area. Soon a cloud of more than a thousand of the six-foot-wide seabirds amassed around us, shrieking as they whizzed through the air and rained down upon the ocean at dizzying speeds.
Then, as quickly as they arrived, the enormous birds disappeared. “That’s the thing about gannets,” said Patteson, shaking his head. “They don’t think anything about picking up and moving from one state to another in a single day.”
Northern Gannets are built for speed,
