Gannets on the collector coins of Alderney

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A gannet in flight.

Alderney hosts the largest colony of gannets in Europe.

Gannets are large white seabirds with yellowish heads, black-tipped wings and long bills. Northern gannets are the largest seabirds in the North Atlantic, having a wingspan of up to 2 m (6.6 ft).


Gannets hunt fish by diving into the sea from a height and pursuing their prey underwater, and have a number of adaptations:


They have no external nostrils; they are located inside the mouth, instead.

They have air sacs in the face and chest under the skin, which act like bubble wrap, cushioning the impact with the water.

The position of their eyes is far enough forward on the face for binocular vision, allowing them to judge distances accurately.

Gannets can dive from a height of 30 m (100 ft), achieving speeds of 100 km/h (60 mph) as they strike the water, enabling them to catch fish at a much greater depth than most airborne birds.

The gannet's supposed capacity for eating large quantities of fish has led to "gannet" becoming a description of somebody with a voracious appetite.

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Alderney is an autonomous dependency of Guernsey.

Because Alderney does not have its own circulation coins, it was symbolically represented by a gannet on the reverse of the Guernsey penny, from 1971 to 1984.

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Alderney, 2 pounds, 1999.  Design by the late Dutchman Willem Vis.  His surname is Dutch for fish, and you can see his signature fish mark at bottom left.

St. Anne's Church against an illuminated horizon. In the foreground are two of the gannets that are found in large numbers around the coast of Alderney. The island of Alderney has Europe's largest gannets colony. Motionless they regard the eclipse because, according to past descriptions, during an eclipse animals may behave as they do at nightfall and birds may go to roost. The sentence "Total eclipse of the sun 1999", the streamers around the sun, the strips above the horizon and the foreground of the charge are inward and polished on the sterling silver and gold coins.

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Alderney, 5 pounds, 2000.  Gannets.  Millennium issue.  Design by Claire Harper of the Royal Mint, UK.