The Bird Dance

Sam and I were outside here discussing our programming and basically how we can affect bigger change and while we're out here beneath the sycamore many many bigger starlings just alighted in the branches above us and started chattering a lot singing and we were wondering what about but while that was happening all of a sudden a lot of things started hitting the dry leaves around us and it wasn't poop a couple other things hit me and fell off and bounced into the pathway here and so we took a look to see what they was and what we found is that they were damp still and they were seeds and they were seeds from hackberry now there's no hackberry around here but we have some on the grounds so as we kept looking around and listening to the leaves as they were getting hit by all these hundreds of birds above us we realized that they were distributing hundreds perhaps thousands of hackberry seeds so this is called ornithocory the bird dance so this is the second seed dispersal mechanism that we're talking about after the ant dance so this is what birds do they're attracted to berries particularly they like bright colored things shiny colors blues reds especially and what they'll do is they'll eat those and they have a gizzard in their gut here and what that gizzard does sometimes it even has stones in it it helps grind down their foods and prepare it for further digestion but in this case because the inside of a hackberry has this hard nut the outside is kind of fleshy and so in the gizzard the bird was able to grind these off and these birds were just kind of afterwards all over the ground here anybody who gardens know that hackberry is a pretty prevalent tree weed you'll find and so this is their main seed dispersal mechanism by birds now also what we found on the ground here is this red berry bright red with some yellowish color seeds in it another bird dispersed plant it's pretty common unfortunately it's a honeysuckle amber honeysuckle and it's the bush honeysuckle that's usually along the front of a forest that's considered an invasive species of plant around us here and so again it's the same mechanism birds are attracted to the bright colors the berries and they consume those and then they either poop or basically cough up the berries and the seeds and that's how these a lot of these birds you