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The article discusses the study on the ability of tree islands to serve as recruitment focus in a two-year study at three sites in northern Honduras. Three islands, with 64, 16 and 4 square meters in sizes, respectively, and at two distances to secondary forest were created by planting 2 meter tall vegetative stakes of two native species. The open-pasture islands of equal sizes served as controls. There were 160 visits of seed-dispersing birds being recorded to islands compared with one visit to open pasture. All in all, there were 144,140 seeds belonging to 186 species were collected in islands. Eighty percent of them were grasses. The study indicated that planting vegetative stakes to create tree islands in pastures accelerates forest recovery by overcoming a number of impediments.