112 GEOGRAPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF BIRDS. 
a pigeon, may scatter from its crop the still fresh rice it had 
swallowed at a distance of ten degrees of latitude, and thus the 
occurrence of isolated plants in situations where their presence 
cannot otherwise well be explained, is easily accounted for.* 
There is a large class of seeds apparently specially fitted by 
nature for dissemination by animals. I refer to those which 
attach themselves, by means of hooks, or by viscous juices, to 
the coats of quadrupeds and the feathers of birds, and are thus 
transported wherever their living vehicles may chance to wan- 
der. Some birds, too, deliberately bury seeds in the earth, or in 
holes excavated by them in the bark of trees, not indeed with 
a foresight aiming directly at the propagation of the plant, but 
from apparently purposeless secretiveness, or as a mode of pre- 
serving food for future use. 
The tame fowls play a much less conspicuous part in rural 
life than the quadrupeds, and, in their relations to the economy 
of nature, they are of very much less moment than four-footed 
animals, or than the undomesticated birds. The domestic tur- 
key + is probably more numerous in the territory of the United 
States than the wild bird of the same species ever was, and the 
grouse cannot, at the period of their greatest abundance, have 
counted as many as we now number of the common hen. The 
dove, however, must fall greatly short of the wild pigeon in 
multitude, and it is hardly probable that the flocks of domestic 
geese and ducks are as numerous as once were those of their 
* Pigeons were shot near Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with green 
rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing, a very few 
hours before, at the distance of seven or eight hundred miles. The efforts of 
the Dutch to confine the cultivation of the nutmeg to the island of Banda are 
said to have been defeated by the birds, which transported this heavy fruit to 
other islands. 
+ The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers of 
very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of the 
former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentleman who 
was among the early white settlers of the West, told me that he once counted, 
in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within a distance of 
four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at most in pairs, after 
swimming over from the Kentucky side 
