These diving dinosaurs have defied death forever. But what now?

August 13, 2026 — 11:41amTo witness a plunging of gannets is to be hypnotised.Each bird soars, spins into a vertical dive and in the split second before piercing the water, folds its wings and becomes a perfect arrow.On those special days when great shoals of pilchards school in the bay beyond the windows of my home in western Victoria, gannets fill the sky and boil the surface of the sea.Gannets transform into missiles as they dive-bomb a shoal of pilchards at Portland.Peter Corbett/Powerhouse ProductionsEach bird hits the water at maybe 100km/h, spearing deep, swallowing its chosen meal before surfacing to prepare for a new dive-bombing run. The fierce intent of it.Of all the seabirds, gannets became my favourite long ago.Perhaps I was unconsciously drawn to them because some wit gave the term “newspaper syndicate” to the list of collective nouns for them, adding to the more obvious “a plunging”, “a company” or “a gannetry” to describe their gatherings.The “media syndicate” is an attempt to compare gannets to a news outfit that shares identical content across numerous publishing outlets, its members flocking and moving and feeding in co-ordinated, noisy colonies.The gannets of my home territory flock in two separate, jam-packed but linked colonies, one on a rock out to sea and the other on the mainland nearby.They have survived everything the elements and enemies can throw at them for millions of years.But now, their instinct to crowd together and breed in exposed nests only centimetres apart puts them in mortal danger.A pandemic is coming.The mainland colony formed on a rocky cliff called Point Danger, about six kilometres south-east of Portland, only 30 years ago.The “new” gannet colony on Point Danger. Lawrence Rocks sits beyond, two kilometres out to sea.Nicole ClearyThe story of its creation is as old as persecution.Longer ago than memory, the gannets of what we call Portland Bay gathered to breed on an ancient volcanic upthrust protected by often vicious waves about two kilometres out to sea.European settlers named the remains of the volcano Lawrence Rocks, though a Gunditjmara man, the late Walter Saunders, once told me the rocks were called Poort in his people’s language.In the 1840s, only a decade after white settlers arrived at Portland, miners seeking fertiliser for farmers began to harvest the ages-deep accumulations of guano deposited by the birds on the rock.The human invasion was devastating. It wasn’t limited to guano harvesting: gannets were killed for their meat. The surviving birds fled, and the rookery was disrupted for 100 years – just as sealers had earlier destroyed the rock’s colony of fur seals.But so strong was the birds’ territorial instinct that when the guano was all mined out and Lawrence Rocks was finally declared a wildlife reserve in 1948, new generations of gannets returned.Eventually, their numbers built to thousands of breeding pairs.Overcrowding followed.By the mid-1990s, the colony began bullying young males that sought to establish their own nests.So vicious was the persecution that the young “bachelor” males fled to a new home on Point Danger, atop a mainland cliff.The point sits within sight of Lawrence Rocks but beyond the sharp beaks of tormentors. There is a sense of the ridiculous in the choice of site: Point Danger is home to the Portland Rifle Club’s shooting range. The area chosen for nesting by the gannets is protected from long-range rifle bullets only by a solid earthen bund, which doubles these days as a viewing spot for intrigued visitors.By the spring of 1996, the bachelors began attracting young females. Soon enough, a miniature new colony began to grow on Point Danger.A gannet brings a strand of seaweed to build its nest at Point Danger near Portland.Nicole ClearyIt was the first gannet colony on the Australian mainland.It remains the only one.The reason gannets had always nested out to sea quickly became obvious.Gannets romancing at the Point Danger colony near Portland, south-west Victoria.Allen McCauleyThe new arrivals and their chicks suffered attacks on the aptly named Point Danger from foxes, feral cats and roaming dogs. In that first nesting season, not a single chick survived. The same disaster followed in the next season.But the optimistic maverick gannets persisted.In time, they attracted the keen interest of human bird watchers, who decided the birds had to be protected.A wire mesh fence was erected, though foxes still managed to sneak through, and ravens, known in that district as crows, attacked eggs and chicks.Maremma dogs, which bond with animals in their care and attack predators, making them popular with chicken farmers, were introduced.But the experiment failed on that lonely and exposed promontory. Free-flying wild birds were much more argumentative and difficult to protect than chickens.Bit by bit, however, the colony grew.Volunteers attached to a committee of management appointed by the state government began winning against the marauding forces creeping through the coastal scrub.An electric fence eventually proved most effective in protecting the birds.It continues to do so and the colony has grown to hundreds of breeding pairs.Today, chicks born bald and helpless survive, grow feathers and fledge, leaping from the cliff and flying free above the turbulent sea three months and 10 days after breaking out of their eggs.Each might be expected to live for 30 to 40 years, usually mating for life, and yes, diving like guided missiles and mesmerising us when shoals of pilchards come close to shore.Gannets diving at Portland.Peter Corbett/Powerhouse ProductionsTheir near-unbelievable story of adaptation to hardship should, perhaps, hardly surprise when we consider that gannets – like all modern birds – are classified in palaeontology as dinosaurs: avian dinosaurs.Their ancestors survived the mass extinction event that took all the big dinosaurs 66 million years ago.All of which makes the coming of the H5N1 strain of the avian flu – detected only a couple of weeks ago in other bird species – so dismaying.In the northern hemisphere, the virus has already destroyed up to 50 per cent of the many colonies of gannets it has penetrated.With a breeding pair achieving just one egg a year, replacement of a colony like Point Danger would take a very long time, if ever.Best to celebrate them now.And hope.Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. 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