Many seeds disperse by riding the wind. Spiders, too. Here’s one of my neighbours that has a different way of moving through the currents of the world. Welcome to yellow dock.
It’s the root that’s yellow.
Dock loves wet areas within dry areas. To get there, it manufactures a kazillion seeds. When the chickadees come in January they nibble a few and the rest fall all over the place, onto the snow.
Chickadee Meal Mess
And there they are, the dark red seeds, catching the sun on their little sails and using its heat to burrow deep into springtime. Humans and chickadees know it as snow, but dock knows it as the moment when the snow melts and flows to low ground. In the end, the seeds are where they want to be, covered with silt and with all the water they need. In this way, dock is turned into chickadees. In this way chickadees are turned into dock.
