Male bowerbirds cultivate plants, a new study reports, though their gardening work appears to be unintentional.

The birds, found in Australia and Papua New Guinea, are named for the extravagant structures they build to woo females. As part of their courting strategy, they decorate these bowers with fruits, and the seeds of these fruits germinate. This results in new plants of the species Solanum ellipticum, also known as the potato bush.

“On average you find about 40 plants where bowers are,” eight times as many as at random sites, said Joah R. Madden, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in England.

The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers found that the birds were not picking areas with high plant concentrations to build their bowers, since the plants began to appear after their arrival.