These different kinds of flowers need different kinds of insects to get their pollen. Some need bees with thick bodies. Some need butterflies with long, slim tubes. Some need wasps with long, slender bodies and legs. Some need little creeping ants, or tiny gnats. Each kind of flower has what will coax the right kind of insects, and keep away the wrong ones. What has the plant besides honey to coax the insect for a visit? The flower has its lovely color, not for us, but for insects. The sweet perfume is also for insects. Flowers that need the visits of moths, or other insects that fly by night, are white or pale yellow. These colors show best at night. Flowers that need the visits of day-flying insects, are mostly red, blue, orange, purple, scarlet. There are some plants, as the grass, which have no sweet perfume and no gay petals. I have told you of flowers which are only a small brown scale with a bunch of stamens and pistils held upon it. And they have no perfumes. These flowers want no insect partners. Their partner is the summer wind! The wind blows the pollen of one plant to another. That fashion suits these plants very well. So, by means of insect or wind partners, the golden pollen is carried far and wide, and seeds ripen. But what about the bird partners? Where do they come in? If the ripe seed fell just at the foot of the parent plant, and grew there, you can see that plants would be too much crowded. They would spread very little. Seeds must be carried from place to place. Some light seeds, as those of the thistle, have a plume. The maple seeds have wings. By these the wind blows them along. But most seeds are too heavy to be wind driven. They must be carried. For this work the plant takes its partner, the bird. To please the eye of the bird, and attract it to the seed, the plant has gay-colored seeds. Also it has often gay-colored seed cases. The rose haws, you know, are vivid red. The juniper has a bright blue berry. The smilax has a black berry. The berries of the mistletoe are white, of the mulberry purple. These colors catch the eye of the bird. Down he flies to swallow the seed, case, and all. Also many seed cases, or covers, are nice food to eat. They are nice for us. We like them. But first of all they were spread out for the bird’s table. Birds like cherries, plums, and strawberries. Did you ever watch a bird picking blackberries? The thorns do not bother him. He swallows the berries fast,--pulp and seed. You have been told of the hard case which covers the soft or germ part of the seed, and its seed-leaf food. This case does not melt up in the bird’s crop or gizzard, as the soft food does. So when it falls to the ground the germ is safe, and can sprout and grow. Birds carry seeds in this way from land to land, as well as from field to field. They fly over the sea and carry seeds to lonely islands, which, but for the birds, might be barren.