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.
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.
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. They need a transport service.
Insects still make up the bulk of the visitors. There are no plants purely pollinated by birds, but also because no one has been looking to see if birds are pollinators there may be more plants that get a benefit.
This is one study in one fen in the UK, but these are common European plants, and common European birds, so it’s reasonable to ask if this might be happening elsewhere too.
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READ THE ARTICLE
Anderson, S., Perry, G., and Thorogood, R.(2026) Generalist passerine birds perform a functional role as pollinators in temperate Europe. Journal of Ecology, 114(7). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.70361.
Cover image: Cyanistes caeruleus by Susan Marley CC BY
