produce berries, just to feed birds and
children? If that be all, why are seeds formed in the berries in such
large numbers? No! They produce berries that contain seeds, and from
these seeds are to grow more bushes. Then why should not the berries
always remain bitter or hard, so that nothing would touch them? If
we may say so, the plant produces sweet and showy berries on purpose
to be eaten, that the seeds may be carried away. What becomes of the
seeds? Each one is enclosed in a hard, tough covering, which protects
it from destruction in the stomachs of many birds and some other
animals. The seeds are well distributed by the animals that eat the
berries. The brilliant colors of ripe berries say to bird and child:
"Here we are; eat us, for we are good." The sweet pulp pays the birds
for distributing the seeds, else they would not be so distributed.
The seeds are as well provided for locomotion as the ticks, the mites,
and the spiders, and when ready to go, the berries flaunt their colors
to attract attention. You see, then, that although the old parent
bush cannot change its place, young bushes grow from the tips of the
branches, and seedlings spring up at long distances from their old
homes.

[Illustration: FIG. 50.--Raspberry, ripened, picked, and ready to
be eaten.]

Sparrows, finches, and similar birds in the winter eat and destroy
seeds of grasses and weeds, while the same birds in summer and autumn
eat bushels of blueberries, huckleberries, elderberries,
raspberries, strawberries, and similar fruits, and distribute their
unharmed seeds over thousands of acres, which otherwise might never
support a growth of these species.

The downy woodpecker, among other things, devours berries of three
kinds of dogwood, Virginia creeper, service berry, strawberry,
pokeberry, poison ivy, poison sumac, stag-horn sumac, and blue beech.

The hairy woodpecker devours many of the above fruits, as well as
those of spicebush, sour gum, cherries, grapes, blackberries. The
flicker devours most of the fruits listed for the two woodpeckers
named above, also hackberry, black alder, green brier, bayberries.
A number of other woodpeckers possess habits much the same as the
three above named. The cedar bird devours many species of hard-seeded
fruits.

The various shades of red appear to good advantage among green leaves.
As illustrations of such, we have the wintergreen, partridge berry,
bush cranberry, bearberry, service berry, curra