Malachite sunbird

Sunbirds fill the hummingbird's role across Africa, Asia and Australasia, though they usually perch to feed rather than hover. The malachite sunbird of southern Africa shows how far a plant will go to accommodate that habit. Babiana ringens, the rat's tail of South Africa's Cape, holds its bright red tubular flowers near the ground and sends up a bare, flowerless stalk whose job is to be a perch. The sunbird, its main pollinator, lands there, leans down into the blooms and picks up pollen in just the right spot. Plants whose stalk was removed produced only about half as many seeds, a neat demonstration of how much this one bird is worth to that one flower.