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Botany One
@botany.one

The unappreciated pollinators of Northern Europe 🧵 doi.org/10.1111/1365... Blue tits might add a bit of colour to the garden, but it turns out that might be doing a lot more than that.

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Botany One
@botany.one

I’ve always been a bit jealous of people in North America or Africa, who can see birds as pollinators. They’re also known as pollinators in Southern Europe but in the north they’ve been overlooked. Now Sandra Anderson and colleagues have found they might also be used by plants in the north.

Botany One
@botany.one

The study is from Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. Biologists have been studying the bird life there using mist nets to catch birds. You can then ring them and release them again to record in the future. This time, they were also swabbed for pollen grains.

Botany One
@botany.one

They found that eighty nine percent of the birds they caught were carrying some pollen, and nine species carried it regularly. Most of the pollen was from goat willow, blackthorn, hawthorn and buckthorn. They might be carrying pollen, but that doesn’t make them pollinators.

Botany One
@botany.one

Maybe they were interfering with pollination. So the team ran an experiment. They bagged blossoms. The bags had a mesh big enough ao allow insects in, but to keep birds out. When they did this fruit set in blackthorn, hawthorn and buckthorn dropped, so the birds were helping pollinate the flowers.