INFLUENCE OF BIKES ON VEGETATION-AS SEED-SOWERS. 87 
yet great enough to enable them to seek it over a wide area.* 
The pigeon is not described by the earliest wdiite inhabitants 
of the American States as filling the air with such clouds of 
winged life as astonish naturalists in the descriptions of Au¬ 
dubon, and, at the present day, the net and the gun have so 
reduced its abundance, that its appearance in large numbers is 
recorded only at long intervals, and it is never seen in the 
great flocks remembered by many still living observers as 
formerly very common. 
Birds as Sowers and Consumers of Seeds , and as 
Destroyers of Insects. 
Wild birds form of themselves a very conspicuous and 
interesting feature in the staffage , as painters call it, of the 
natural landscape, and they are important elements in the 
view we are taking of geography, whether we consider their 
immediate or their incidental influence. Birds affect vegeta¬ 
tion directly by sowing seeds and by consuming them; they 
affect it indirectly by destroying insects injurious, or, in some 
cases, beneficial to vegetable life. Hence, when we kill a seed¬ 
sowing bird, we check the dissemination of a plant; when we 
kill a bird which digests the seed it swallows, we promote the 
increase of a vegetable. Nature protects the seeds of wild, 
much more effectually than those of domesticated plants. The 
cereal grains are completely digested when consumed by birds, 
but the germ of the smaller stone fruits and of very many other 
wild vegetables is uninjured, perhaps even stimulated to more 
vigorous growth, by the natural chemistry of the bird’s stom¬ 
ach. The power of flight and the restless habits of the bird 
enable it to transport heavy seeds to far greater distances than 
* The wood pigeon has been observed to increase in numbers in Europe 
also, when pains have been taken to exterminate the hawk. The pigeons, 
which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in pass¬ 
ing a given point, were no doubt injurious to the grain, but probably less 
so than is generally supposed; for they did not confine themselves exclu¬ 
sively to the harvests for their nourishment. 
