Keep Seed Alive

The simplest of things that God has created are creations ignored for the most part, yet without which, life, in many cases, could not exist. For example, without the lowly and unesteemed earthworm, much of life would cease to exist. He burrows through the earth breaking up fallow ground so it doesn’t turn into bedrock and the castings that he throws off contribute to the rich fertile earth. The worm is a staple in the diets of many birds—God’s avian wonders—and a delectable delight to many waterborne creatures. The earthworm fulfills many other necessary duties as well. The glorious wisdom of God’s design is ever present and ever so marvelous: Everything perfectly in its place and purpose. So it is with today’s subject.

GOD SAID, Genesis 7:1-4:

1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.

3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

God said to take the birds on the ark in groups of seven. God said they would keep seed alive upon the earth.

MAN SAID: Noah, his ark, and the worldwide flood never happened!  As far as that goes, God never happened either.

Now THE RECORD: God is infinite in wisdom. He is perfect in every way and long before man partially discovered the secrets of life, God declared it in His beautiful Word, the majority-text Holy Bible.

Proverbs 3:19 declares it well:

The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.

In the design stage of creation, God engineered all things to coexist and function as one harmonious entity. It’s analogous to the human body: all the human systems and appointments complementing and edify one another.

Excellent examples of God’s perfect design are the seed and the bird. As stated earlier, when God created the bird, one of its design functions was to keep seed alive on the earth. God created seed to have life within itself and He created it with specific interactive properties. One of these interactive properties is apparent when a seed is exposed to dirt and water: it sprouts and begins to grow. That reaction is a matter of creative design. However, when a seed is swallowed by a bird, it reacts differently and that also is a result of God’s perfect creative design. Because of the way God designed seeds, and because of the way God designed the bird’s digestive tract, the seed does not yield to the bird’s digestive juices. The bird eats the seed and simply passes the undigested seed when it moves its bowels. Not only does the bird pass the seed, but it passes it fully fertilized and ready to grow. Much of the time, the bird passes the seed in flight many miles from the seed’s original home.

GOD SAID that His birds would keep seed alive on the earth.

The following excerpts are taken from various professional texts:

An ecologist [Dr. Margaret Kinnaird of the Wildlife Conservation Society] studying a spectacular fruit-eating bird, the red-knobbed hornbill, in Indonesia has found that it seems to play an important role in maintaining and regenerating the rain forest.

"Hornbills are the farmers of the Sulawesi forest. They travel long distances in search of ripe fruit from more than 50 different trees, particularly energy-rich figs, and they deposit the seeds not only in primary forest but in secondary forest and burned habitats."

Tiny fig seeds are defecated undamaged and sprout in crooks and branches high in the forest canopy, Dr. Kinnaird reported in Natural History magazine. "Larger seeds of fruits such as nutmegs and wild mangoes are spit out, often more than an hour after the fruit is harvested," she wrote. "By that time a hornbill can have traveled a mile of two from the parent tree and deposited the seed in a spot where it can more likely germinate free of competition."

"The redknobs are critical agents of seed dispersal, cultivating their own lush garden," she said.

The red-knobbed hornbill has a fleshy, electric-blue throat pouch that can be stuffed with a pound or more of figs for airlifting to its nest. "The pouch doesn’t stretch as much as a pelican’s," Dr. Kinnaird said, "but you can see the lumps and tell when a bird is coming back with quite a load. I watched one male cough up 265 figs of a single species. You can identify every item the bird delivers, which is one of the reasons I couldn’t resist studying it."

Redknobs, Dr. Kinnaird said, fly as far as 13 miles a day to feed on the fruit of more than 30 species of figs that abound year-round on Tangkoko’s slopes at densities of up to 11 trees per acre.

The density of fig trees and fruit production in Tangkoko...are exceptionally high compared with other Southeast Asian forests, where hornbills usually are found in relatively small numbers. Moreover, while figs and red-knobbed hornbills are also found in secondary and burned forests or regenerating agricultural lands, the birds prefer primary habitat where larger trees bear larger crops.

The headline reads, "Mistletoe, of all things, helps juniper trees," Science News, January 2002.

In a lean year, patches of woods bristling with mistletoes attracted three times as many major fruit-eating birds, such as Townsend’s solitaires, than mistletoe-free patches did.

All those avian visitors may explain the bumper crop of juniper seedlings in mistletoe-rich patches, suggest van Ommeren and Whitham. The flesh on a juniper fruit hardens into a seed prison if left untouched. Removing that flesh when soft, as a bird’s digestive system does, increases by a factor of 10 a seed’s chance of sprouting, according to earlier experiments.

The common American Tree Sparrow consumes weed and grass seeds in large quantities and spreads the fertilized seed faithfully. Other birds migrate over vast distances carrying seed. More than 300 North American species including the marvelous hummingbird fly to Central and South America for the winter.

God is the Creator of all. His ways are past finding out.

GOD SAID, Genesis 7:1-4:

1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.

3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

God said to take the birds on the ark in groups of seven. God said they would keep seed alive upon the earth.

MAN SAID: Noah, his ark, and the worldwide flood never happened!  As far as that goes, God never happened either.

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

References:

King James Bible

Burton, R., National Audubon Society, North American Birdfeeder Handbook, pp 124, 155, 192.

Line, Les, Hornbills Are Lynchpins of Indonesian Rain Forest, January 1996.

"Mistletoe, of all things, helps juniper trees," Science News, Vol. 161, January 2002.

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