Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 February 1917 — Mistletoe an Odd Parasite; Has No Use for the Earth. [ARTICLE]

Mistletoe an Odd Parasite; Has No Use for the Earth.

The story of how the mistletoe gets on the trees is a most interesting one. Covering the mistletoe twigs are pearly white berries. These come in the winter season, when food is comparatively scarce, and hence some -birds eat them freely. Now. when a robin eats a cherry he swallows simply the meat and flips the stone away. The seed of the mistletoe the bird cannot flip. It Ls_siicky_ and holds, to his bill. His only resource is to wipe it off, and he does so. leaving it sticking to the branches of the tree on which he is sitting at the time. The seed sprouts after a thpik.,uad,Jiu!i fliidlng earth—which, indent, its ancestral habit has made it cease wanting—it sinks its roots into the. bark of the tree and hunts there for the pipes that carry the Sap. Now, the sap- in the bark is the very richest in the tree, far richer than that in the wood, and the mistletoe gets from its host The choicest of food. With a strange foresight it does not throw its leaves away, as do most parasites, but keeps them t<s‘ use in winter, when the tree is leafless. ,