bluebells, how do they do it?

I am amazed at the number of bluebells that have sprung up around the garden.  Charmed, given that they are very pretty, and I like the idea of the wood spilling out into the rest of the property, but surprised, given that I was taught as a mantra at horticultural college that bluebells are weak colonisers with poor dispersal mechanisms, slow to move out of their original site.  According to the website of Trees for Life, Scotland's leading conservation charity, which I looked at first simply because it came at the top of my Google search for 'bluebell seed dispersal', the wild bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, simply drops its seeds on the ground, and so they are slow to spread.

Nonetheless, something is spreading them.  There have been some clumps in the gravel by the blue summerhouse for several years.  They are growing under the canopy of a crab apple, which makes me wonder if a bird is involved, eating the seeds, then perching and squitting.  There are a couple of good clusters in the back garden right next to a conifer whose fibrous roots must suck most of the moisture out of the soil.  The earth where they have chosen to live by the summerhouse is pretty mere sand, so bluebells must be able to take it dry.

There is a nice little patch developing in thin grass under the little oak at the end of the daffodil lawn.  Bluebells under a tree canopy again, so are birds indeed involved?  We were also taught at horticultural college that bluebells did not require shade per se, they merely grew in woodland because they could not compete with grass, and grass could not take shade.  Observation around the garden shows that bluebells will grow in grass, not necessarily the thickest and tallest sward, but they'll cope in turf as long as it's not too vigorous.  Parts of the grounds of the local St Osyth's Priory are thick with bluebells, where it abuts the road, growing densely in grass and almost full sun, a testament to the fact that this ground has been parkland for hundreds of years.  Alas, part of it must have been quarried for sand at some point, since the bluebells come to an abrupt halt just where the level falls away twenty feet or more.

We have quite a few groups in the rose bed nearest the house.  They don't have to compete with grass there, though the leaves of Brunnera, Pachysandra and other shade lovers are starting to cover the ground fairly fully.  Still, it's up to the bluebells.  If they can fight their corner and reinvent the rose bed as a bluebell wood, among other things, that's fine by me.  I am still curious about how the seeds get there, though.  And why I never seem to notice young developing plants, as I do with the self-seeding Camassia, but only flowering clumps?  Unless it is not seeds that are spreading, but the bulbs themselves.  Do jays or any other food storing creature eat and cache away bluebell bulbs?  I must ask the next time I find myself among wildlife experts.

Meanwhile a bird or birds have been eating and squitting some sort of fruit on the terrace (or patio), since there are several splashes of dark purple and liquid droppings, each with a cluster of large seeds at its centre.  I suspect pheasants, given the size of the seeds, and the proximity of the piles of purple crap to the house.  Or it could be blackbirds.  The seeds are as large as grains of wheat, brown, rounded and pointed at one end, and after passing through some animal's gut they are presumably primed for germination and ready to go.  I was almost tempted to sow a pot full, just to see what they turned into, but the thought struck me that anyone who goes around randomly sowing seeds collected from unknown bird mess probably needs to get out more.