Seedlings - from bird droppings and pellets

The larger birds which come to the bird feeder drop various items which contain lots of plant seeds. One can see the larger seeds quite clearly in the items the birds leave behind.

Some of these are regurgitated items, known as "pellets". Others are, to put not too fine a point on it, bird droppings, or "Bird Poo".

I have been curious about these, to know what the birds eat, (firstly) and then, to see what I can raise.

Several months ago I collected a number of these pellets and the dried bird poo, and placed them in a cut-down plastic drink bottle, with some local soil.The first things which came up were very fast to germinate. Two weeks or just over. They had relatively large leaves, and from my experience with weeds around Robertson I knew straight away that they were "Ink Weed" seedlings.

Then the next lot to germinate (after about one month) were these Kangaroo Apple seedlings. They have hardly grown since coming through.

For several months now I have been patiently waiting to see what would happen to them but almost nothing. I need to prick them out and put them into a better drained soil mixture. You might notice, if you click on the image to enlarge it, that some of the stems of these seedlings are purplish, and noticeably hairy. In that regard, they resemble Tomato seedlings - to which they are related. They are both in the Solanaceae.

Resemblances like that are really quite eerie, as, in other respects, the plants do not look at all similar, apart from the shape of their flowers.

Anyway, in the last few days, several new seedlings have emerged. They have very large, rounded leaves. At this stage I have no idea what species of plants these seedlings might grow into.

I love a challenge, so I shall pot these on shortly, and see what develops.