MARCH. 71 



plants. The modes by which any particular result is 

 reached are infinite. 



It is very delightful in the early part of the season to 

 hear the blackbirds and thrushes piping out their mellow 

 songs, but we are often inclined to think we pay too dearly 

 for our music. When we find our fruit being eaten up, we 

 are apt to forget any good the feathered musicians do. It 

 is due to the habit of fruit eating on the part of these and 

 other birds that our Town Belt is now becoming over-run 

 with elder-berry bushes. Just as many flowers produce 

 bright petals, fragrance, nectar, or superabundance of 

 pollen, to attract insects to them and thus bring about 

 cross-fertilisation and prodviction of fine seed, so many 

 plants ripen their seeds inside of a mass of succulent pulp, 

 in order that birds may thus be tempted to swallow them. 

 The production of a certain quantity of attractive suc- 

 culence is the price the plants pay to get their seeds 

 scattered. For the birds swallow them and pass them 

 through their alimentary canal undigested. Sometimes 

 the whole of the seed-vessel becomes pulpy, as in the 

 gooseberry or poro-poro* (commonly called bulli-bulli), 

 and in these cases the seeds have a sufficiently hard shell 

 to resist the digestive juices of the bird's stomach ; or the 

 inner portion of the seed-vessel becomes stony or woody, 

 as in the plum or cherry, and as in our native Coprosmas 

 (Stink wood, etc.), and this equally resists digestion. Fruit- 

 eating birds do not swallow stones, as graminivorous birds 

 do, otherwise they would grind up and destroy the seeds 

 they eat. This device of a succulent pulp is arrived at in 

 a great many different ways in different plants ; but the 

 object remains the same in all. In the apple, pear, quince, 

 hawthorn, and mountain ash, it is the outer portion of the 

 tube of the flower which becomes succulent, and the smaller 

 of these fruits are particular favourites with the birds. 

 Indeed it is noticeable now that blackbirds and thrushes 

 seldom leave the fruit of the rowan or mountain ash alone 

 once it colours, and those who grow these trees for the 

 sake of their ornamental fruit are annually disappointed. 



* Solatium aviculare. 



