48 
House & Garden 
V 
THE MARRIAGE OF FLOWERS BY BIRDS 
The Essential Role Played by Certain Birds in Bringing About the Fertilization of 
Blossoms—Interesting Examples from Both Hemispheres 
ERNESTINGERSOLL 
O NE of the many delightful paragraphs in 
that generally delightful book, ‘"The 
Birds of Jamaica,” by Philip Henry Gosse, 
father of the English critic, is one relating to 
the banana-quit. “Scarcely larger,” Mr. Gosse 
Avrites, “than the average size of the humming¬ 
birds, this little creeper is often seen in com¬ 
pany with them, probing the same flowers, and 
for the same purpose, but in a very different 
manner. . . . The quit alights on the tree, and 
proceeds in the most businesslike manner to 
peep into the flower, hopping actively from 
twig to twig, and throwing the body into all 
positions, often clinging by the feet with the 
back downwards the better to reach the interior 
of the blossom with his curved beak and pen¬ 
cilled tongue.” 
An interesting thing about this account, from 
the naturalist’s point of view, is the absence 
(similarly noteworthy in Gosse’s equally 
charming pictures of hummingbirds) of any 
remark that these birds came out of the deep 
corollas they explored with their heads dusted 
like a miller’s hat with pollen, which they 
brushed off and renewed from flower to flower 
as they visited one after another. It is true 
that Gosse wrote his book some years before 
Sprengel, Darwin and Wallace and Fritz 
Muller had begun to reveal to us the conjugal 
mysteries of the marriage of plants by the aid 
of insects; yet it is strange he did not observe 
and note the presence of pollen on the feathers 
of these birds he knew so well. 
O RDINARY plants reproduce by means 
of their flowers. These consist of a more 
or less gaily colored envelope, the corolla, with¬ 
in which are several slender growths called 
stamens carrying on their summits little packets 
(anthers) filled at the proper season with 
minute grains of a flour-like substance called 
pollen, which corresponds to the male element 
in animals. From the center of the flower rises 
a hollow stalk (the pistil) with somewhat 
sticky tip (the stigma); and at the base is a 
chamber that contains one or several embryos 
of seeds (ovules)—the female part of the plant. 
The object of this arrangement is that ripe 
pollen shall reach the stigma, be caught there 
and then shall pass down the tubular pistil to 
the ovule, and entering it shall fertilize it and 
so cause it to develop into a perfect seed which, 
when nourished by the kindly earth, will repro¬ 
duce its kind of plant. 
But nature has found, as we recognize, that 
self-fertilization or “inbreeding,” as we say, is 
a bad policy; it diminishes vigor and leads to 
degeneracy of the species. Therefore most 
flowers are so constructed as to prevent a stigma 
from receiving pollen from its own circle of 
anthers, while it is advantgeously placed to 
catch and hold pollen from other blossoms, 
especially those growing on a different plant. 
This transference of pollen from one flower 
or plant to another is accomplished in many 
interesting ways, but I am concerned here only 
with one. 
Long years ago it was noticed that a bee, for 
example, gathering honey from flowers became 
coated with pollen and that some of it would 
always be brushed off on the stigma in the next 
blossom entered. These flowers—many of 
which had no other means of pollination—were 
fertilized by the visits of insects bringing them 
foreign pollen and taking their own to another 
flower. This healthy method of interchange is 
known as “cross-fertilization”; and the books 
of modern naturalists are filled with fascinat¬ 
ing stories of these lovely marriage rites in 
flower-land. 
After this interlude—which I trust the elder 
readers will pardon for the sake of the younger 
ones—let us go back to our banana-quit. 
I NSECTS visit flowers mainly for one or 
both of two reasons—to get the sugary 
liquid called nectar in the blossom’s innermost 
pocket, or in the case of minute sorts, for the 
safe dwelling place the corollas afford them. 
At any rate, flies and other small insects 
abound inside most flowers, especially the big, 
tubular, nectar-holding corollas of the tropical 
trees and vines, far more numerous there than 
in colder zones. 
Now this banana-quit had found this out 
long before Mr. Gosse did; and he got his liv¬ 
ing day by day in searching the blossoms in 
his native woods for the toothsome little bugs 
hidden there, and like them none the less for 
the nectar with which they were smeared. The 
banana flower was his special choice, and in 
frequenting it he. cultivated the crop of ba¬ 
nanas, for his head became dusted with fer¬ 
tilizing pollen a part of which he gave to every 
new flower and its ovules that he reached. Not 
that he knew or cared about this. Doubtless 
the sticky pollen was a nuisance—a disagree¬ 
able accident of his business, like coal-dust to 
a miner, and he had to spend his leisure every 
day in cleaning his feathers when he would 
rather be asleep. 
Perhaps, therefore, it was not accident but a 
real discovery on the part of a cousin of his, 
the Bahama creeper, that led to a method by 
which this nuisance could be avoided; for that 
bird gets its food from the “leaf of life” (Verea 
crenata) by thrusting its bill through the base 
of the petals right into the nectar, instead of 
going inside. From the point of view of the 
plant, however, this is mere burglary, whereas 
the banana-quit pays for its sweets by trans¬ 
planting pollen. 
These quits, or sugar-birds, of which the 
West Indies and South America possess many 
species with similar habits, have slender, 
curved bills, and long tongues, bifid and frayed 
at the tip like those of the hummingbirds and 
of the sun-birds and honey-suckers of the Old 
World, to neither of which are the quits other¬ 
wise related in structure. 
T he sun-birds and honey-suckers are con¬ 
fined to the warmer parts of the Old 
World, and have pointed and somewhat curved 
bills, much like those of the hummingbirds, 
which they further resemble in size, shape and 
brilliancy of plumage. In fact, observing but 
unscientific travelers in the Orient have often 
described them as hummingbirds, although no 
true hummers are known outside of America. 
This agreement is especially close in the tongue, 
which in both is long, protrusile, and provided 
with suctorial powers. In the hummingbirds 
the tongue is rolled into a pair of tubes sepa¬ 
rated at the tips, each of which has a horny 
fringe. In the honey-suckers and sun-birds 
the tongue forms a single horny tube, single at 
the base, but double-barrelled toward the tip, 
where in the honey-suckers it forms a hollow 
brush, and in the sun-birds is frayed into brist¬ 
ly tips. “The object of the terminal vibrissae 
in the sun-birds, and the tubular brush in the 
honey-suckers,” Dr. Gadow explains, “seems 
to be to prevent the air from rushing into the 
tube, if there should not be enough nectar to 
fill it, inasmuch as the fluid will then enter 
the anterior part of the tube by capillary action, 
and then be sucked up.” 
This resemblance in feeding organs, accom¬ 
panied by other external likenesses, between 
groups of birds anatomically separated in 
classification, is an excellent example of what 
naturalists call “convergence,” that is, the 
tendency of entirely different and perhaps far 
separated kinds of animals to assume similar 
adaptations to meet similar requirements, as, 
in this case, the need of getting their living 
from blossoms containing nectar and harbor¬ 
ing insects. 
T he honey-eaters chiefly inhabit Australia, 
and Dr. Gould, the eminent Australian 
ornithologist, considered their brush-like tongue 
especially adapted for gathering the honey from 
the flower caps of the eucalyptus trees. In 
fact, birds of this family are peculiarly Aus¬ 
tralian, none of them being found outside the 
range of “that wealth of nectariferous flowering 
shrubs and trees, which,” as Wallace remarks, 
“is one of the marked features of Australian 
vegetation.” The same rigid limitation to this 
province characterizes the lories, or brush- 
tongued parrots—a group that get a large part 
of their living from the flowers, especially of 
the eucalyptus. They are distinguished, as 
their name implies, by the dense coating of 
papillae on the tongue with which they lick up 
honey and insects together; and more than one 
writer has mentioned that their foreheads are 
smeared with yellow pollen as they go eagerly 
from tree to tree, rifling the blossoms and pay¬ 
ing for their board. 
Now it is a very significant fact that Aus¬ 
tralia and its neighboring islands are strikingly 
deficient in insects, especially of bees and but¬ 
terflies, so important in the scheme of flower- 
fertilization in Europe and America. There 
are no bumblebees there and it was necessary 
to import and acclimatize them before clover 
for fodder could be raised. Yet it is stated 
that in New Zealand “no less than one-fourth 
of all the flowering plants are incapable of self- 
fertilization, and therefore wholly dependent 
on insects and birds.” 
This shows how important a service to plants 
is rendered in Australasia by birds, and why 
the brush-tongued sorts have been locally de¬ 
veloped in so large numbers. It is probable 
that it also accounts for the prevalence of the 
gum-trees {Eucalyptus) there. No doubt cer¬ 
tain birds and certain flowers have become, to 
some extent, made for one another. Thus in 
{Continued on page 60) 
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