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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.

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.

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.

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.

Why these plants? Well, they flower early in the spring when it’s still cold. Many insects, other than bumblebees, aren’t really active when it’s below 13 degrees celsius. That’s a problem for buckthorn, blackthorn and hawthorn. They had their blossoms out and they can’t self-pollinate.