While some seeds are destroyed by passing through the digestive tract of animals many are not harmed in the least. From over two hundred and fifty different kinds of plant seeds fed to a variety of birds over 80 per cent germinated perfectly after passing through their digestive tracts. And perhaps the most remarkable case is the seed of a pondweed said to be incapable of germination until it has passed through a bird. This plant grows in fresh water ponds in great quantities and is much eaten by wild ducks. From the stomach of one bird over three hundred such seeds were recovered. In the Eastern States a common feature of our farms is the red cedar or juniper scattered along fence rows, nearly all of which are due to birds roosting on fence rails and dropping the seeds after passage through their digestive tract. We get some idea of the part birds play in plant dispersal when we realize the enormous number of them that make their flights twice a year, often over great distances. Wild ducks, in untold millions, travel from the far north to the tropics, each carrying their freight of seeds, sometimes as food and often mechanically clinging to their feet. The writer once saw at Gardiner’s Island and Montauk, Long Island, hundreds of thousands of tree swallows which feed on the fruits of the bayberry (_Myrica carolinensis_). So dense was the flock that they covered nearly every inch of the bayberry patches, and after eating no one can calculate how many million seeds they started off toward their winter home. Stopping as they do each day on their long flight southward, is it any wonder that the bayberry is one of the commonest bushes along the Atlantic coast? With flights of birds stretching from the Arctic to the Antarctic, sometimes a single species making such a flight during its migration period, and hundreds of species making shorter flights twice a season, it is easily seen how birds can carry seeds for long distances. That they do so carry them is common knowledge and in eleven wild ducks examined by H. B. Guppy, he found nearly 300 seeds of bur reed, forty-one of pondweed, 270 sedges and 222 seeds that he could not identify. Nearly all these seeds germinated when sown, some sprouting more quickly than if they had not passed through the bird’s stomach. Some few seeds which would usually be dormant for one, two or even three years, have their germination unquestionably hastened by passage through birds, who may be looked on in some cases at least as “flying germinators.”