Re: Tree Lucerne

Cilla Kinross wrote about her concern that Tree Lucerne (TL) "might be
attractive to introduced birds, particularly House Sparrow and European
Goldfinch".

There are two issues here:

1. do introduced birds eat the TL seeds (and so have a source of
nutrition that would otherwise be unavailable ?, ie. does it add to the
populations of introduced birds ?)

2. do ANY bird species eat the TL seeds and incompletely digest them so
that they are vectors of the spread of TL ?

I am particularly interested in the second of these.  I have seen
pigeons (Spotted Turtle Dove and Common Bronzewings) in the vicinity of
TL without being sure they ate the seeds. But if they did would they
excrete anything which would make TL spread ?


Michael Norris
Hampton (SE Melbourne) Vic.