Native trees and shrubs for birds: caterpillars, fruit, mast, nests and winter cover, month by month

The best tree for birds is an oak, because it raises more caterpillars than anything else, and the best planting is an oak with a spicebush, a dogwood and a serviceberry under it.

Birds live on trees and shrubs in every month: caterpillars off the leaves in May, cherries in July, spicebush berries in September, acorns in November and holly fruit in February. Trees and shrubs also give them a dead limb to nest in and an evergreen to sleep in. Native species do all of this and ornamentals from other continents mostly do not.

In the suburbs of Washington, DC, Carolina chickadees held their numbers only in yards where native plants made up more than 70 percent of the plant biomass. Yards below that line raised too few young to replace themselves. Across North America the breeding bird population has fallen by 2.9 billion since 1970, more than one bird in four. What grows on your ground is the part of that you control.

Caterpillars first: what nestlings are made of

Almost every songbird in a yard, whatever it eats in winter, raises its young on insects, and most of those insects are caterpillars. Ninety-six percent of North America’s land birds depend on insects, and at least 310 species prey heavily on caterpillars. It may take 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars in a season for a pair of Carolina chickadees to raise one brood of five. Catbirds and nuthatches feed their nestlings almost nothing else.

Caterpillars come from native woody plants because most moths and butterflies can eat only the plants they evolved with, which the Lepidoptera article covers in full. In the eastern forests the counts by genus run like this:

Counting caterpillars in the Washington yards, Desirée Narango’s team found 20 or more in five minutes on a native oak and one or none on nonnative plants. The chickadees in yards full of ornamentals switched to spiders and fledged fewer young. The counts were made from mid-May into early June, when the nestlings are being fed. The beetles, sawflies and flies that follow are the insects article’s subject.

Fruit, season by season

Once the young have fledged, fruit takes over. Each native species ripens when a particular set of birds needs it, and the fat content matches the job. We grow every plant in the three tables below.

Summer, June to August

Fall migration, late August to October

A warbler or thrush leaving for the tropics has to build fat before it goes, and the fruits that ripen now are the fattest of the year.

“Spicebush fruit composition is nearly 50% fat, and they become ripe in the fall. This seasonal timing and high fat content make them a great fuel source for fall migrants and over-wintering resident birds.” (Penn State Extension, Native Plants of PA: Spicebush)

Winter, November to March

The fruits that hang on into winter are the ones birds pass over in fall, usually because they are low in fat.

Six of these, with a black chokeberry added for late summer, go together as a hedge that fruits from June through the following March: the Bird & Berry Hedgerow.

Mast: acorns and nuts

White oak acorns feed blue jays, bobwhites, mallards, grouse and wild turkeys; red-headed and red-bellied woodpeckers gather acorns and beechnuts in fall and jam them into bark crevices for later. White-group acorns go in the fall and red-group acorns last into winter, so an oak of each group keeps the table set, as the oak article explains.

Blue jays are the oaks’ planters. In Blacksburg, Virginia, jays carried off and buried 133,000 acorns from one stand of pin oaks, 54 percent of the crop. They carried them an average of 0.7 miles and as far as 1.2 miles. The jays chose beechnuts and the small and medium acorns of pin, willow and black oak. They left the big acorns of red and white oak.

Every oak we sell feeds birds. Acorns of bear oak go to game birds and songbirds. Acorns of overcup oak feed ducks and turkeys. The dwarf chinquapin oak bears within a few years of planting.

The nuts, and the birds that take them:

• Shagbark hickory: wood ducks, turkeys, blue jays, nuthatches and red-bellied woodpeckers; shellbark and pignut hickory nuts go to turkeys and wood ducks as well.
• Allegheny chinquapin: blue jays, pileated and red-headed woodpeckers and turkeys.
• American hazelnut: bobwhites, ruffed grouse, turkeys and songbirds.
• Black walnut and pecan: mainly squirrels.

Sap, buds, catkins and seeds

The parts nobody thinks of feed birds too. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers drill wells in birches, maples, hollies and hemlocks, and hummingbirds, waxwings and red-bellied woodpeckers drink at them; the sapsucker article covers who comes to the holes. Ruffed grouse live on buds through the winter. The buds, catkins and seeds of these trees of ours feed birds:

• Hop hornbeam: buds and catkins that are an important winter food for grouse, and nutlets for turkeys, purple finches, rose-breasted grosbeaks and downy woodpeckers.
• American hornbeam: seed for yellow-rumped warblers, grouse and bobwhites.
• Smooth alder: flowers in March and seed in small cones after, for the redpolls, pine siskins and goldfinches that work alder and birch catkins.
• Eastern redbud: pods that hang through winter, with goldfinches and quail working the seed out of them.
• Bald cypress: seed for wood ducks and turkeys.
• Black locust: seed for bobwhites and grouse.

Nectar for hummingbirds

The ruby-throated hummingbird reaches the Mid-Atlantic in mid-April, before most flowers, and drinks at sapsucker wells until the trees bloom. Red buckeye opens in early spring and is a tree that feeds it on the way north. Pinxterbloom azalea, the pink native azalea of the Mid-Atlantic woods, opens in April and May.

Among ours, these draw hummingbirds to their flowers:

• Black locust, which flowers from April to June and is a favorite of hummingbirds and honey bees.
• Carolina silverbell, whose buds other birds eat.
• Rosebay rhododendron.
• Mountain laurel.
• Sweet pepperbush.
• Eastern redbud.
• Red elderberry.
• Washington hawthorn.

The bees that share these flowers are the bee article’s subject. A hummingbird nests 10 to 20 feet up on a thin limb, in a cup of plant down and spider silk shingled with lichen. A female catches up to 2,000 insects and spiders to raise her young. The same trees feed and house her.

Nests, cavities and dead wood

In Pennsylvania 35 species of birds and 20 mammals nest or den in tree cavities. Seven woodpeckers dig the holes that decay does not open: pileated, northern flicker, yellow-bellied sapsucker, hairy, downy, red-headed and red-bellied.

A pileated woodpecker digs a new nest every year, 15 to 80 feet up in a dead tree or a dead limb of a live one. It lives largely on carpenter ants. Its old holes go to wood ducks, screech owls, great crested flycatchers, tree swallows, chickadees, nuthatches, wrens and bluebirds.

American basswood decays easily and produces a disproportionate number of cavities, used by wood ducks and pileated woodpeckers. Black gum hollows out and holds nests, bats and tree frogs, and American holly cavities house red-cockaded woodpeckers in the South. Leave snags that stand clear of targets, leave the tops that fall, and treat a hollow tree as habitat; a field edge can carry five to ten den trees an acre.

“Dead limbs and trees are a natural and desirable part of wildlife habitat. The existence of numerous species depends on the presence of dead trees.” (Penn State Extension, Dead Wood for Wildlife)

A wood thrush builds 10 to 15 feet up in the fork of a deciduous tree, and a cedar waxwing 6 to 20 feet up on a horizontal limb. A yellow-rumped warbler builds out on a conifer branch, and a ruffed grouse on the ground under dense brush. Thickets of American plum are the main breeding habitat of seven songbirds in the shrub stage of Piedmont old fields. Washington hawthorn and American crabapple branches hold nests, and black elderberry is an excellent nest site. Eastern red cedar is a favorite nest tree of chipping sparrows, robins and mockingbirds.

Cover and winter shelter

A bird in January needs a windbreak more than a feeder. Evergreens belong on the side the winter wind comes from. Eastern red cedar is roosting cover for screech owls, saw-whet owls, juncos and yellow-rumped warblers. Hemlock gives winter cover to grouse and turkeys and nests to black-throated green and blackburnian warblers. American holly is winter cover as well as winter fruit, rosebay rhododendron thickets are winter and escape cover for grouse, turkeys and songbirds, and mountain laurel shelters screech owls and grouse.

Deciduous cover counts too: young oaks that hold their dead leaves are often the only brushy winter cover in a young stand. That makes marcescence worth something to a bird. Thickets of American hazelnut, American plum and black huckleberry hide birds and nests. Under all of it, leaf litter is where birds find insects all winter, which is the habitat article’s argument.

Why native, with the numbers

Three lines of evidence say native species, not just any tree. First, the caterpillars. A 2009 ranking of all 1,385 plant genera growing in the Mid-Atlantic found that native woody plants supported far more species of moths and butterflies than introduced ones. On six pairs of properties in southeastern Pennsylvania, the yards landscaped with natives had more caterpillars, more birds and more breeding pairs, and birds of regional conservation concern were 8 times as abundant.

“Our results reveal that properties landscaped with nonnative plants function as population sinks for insectivorous birds.” (Narango, Tallamy and Marra, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018)

Second, the fruit. In Rochester, New York, native shrub fruits ran from 6.6 to 48.7 percent fat by dry weight and invasive fruits no more than 1 percent, with common buckthorn at 0.3 percent. At one site, 83 percent of the fruit crop was native dogwood and arrowwood, and at another, wild grape made up most of it. Migrating warblers and sparrows caught at the first carried more of the blood fats that show weight gain than birds at the second. The invasive shrubs also spread on the birds that eat them and choke a woods.

Third, the cultivars. When native shrubs bred for red, blue or purple leaves were tested against the wild type, insects fed on them less in every trial. Buy the straight species, and for spicebush, winterberry and holly buy both male and female plants; a flowering cherry or plum sold for its blossoms usually sets no fruit at all.

The trees and shrubs that attract the most birds, ranked

1. An oak. More caterpillars than anything else, acorns for jays, woodpeckers and turkeys, a trunk that eventually hollows. White oak and northern red oak are the everyday choices; we also grow swamp chestnut oak, cherrybark oak, overcup oak and the shrub oaks, among others. The rare oaks lists most of them.
2. Black cherry. 340 caterpillar species on the genus and late-summer fruit for robins, thrashers, bluebirds, catbirds, waxwings, thrushes and vireos. American plum and beach plum share the genus.
3. Flowering dogwood, with silky dogwood in wet ground and gray dogwood for the fattest fruit of the three.
4. Spicebush, for the thrushes.
5. Black gum, for the migration and, in old age, the hollows.
6. The serviceberries, for June.
7. Eastern red cedar and American holly, one evergreen for fruit, roosts and nests. Red cedar is the better bird tree.
8. Winterberry and staghorn sumac, for February.
9. Black elderberry and red mulberry, for summer fruit and nest sites.
10. Shagbark hickory, American hazelnut and Allegheny chinquapin, for mast.
11. Hop hornbeam, American hornbeam and smooth alder, for winter buds, catkins and seed.
12. Black locust, the hummingbird tree we grow.
13. Hackberry, for the winter fruit.
14. Sassafras, for its high-fat fall fruit.
15. Arrowwood viburnum, whose fruit ran 42 to 50 percent fat in a New York study.
16. Northern bayberry, whose waxy fruit held above the snow lets yellow-rumped warblers winter farther north than most warblers.

Hackberry, sassafras, arrowwood viburnum and northern bayberry joined the Blue Whale Trees catalog with this article, because a list of the best bird plants that we could not supply was a list worth fixing.

How to plant for birds

• Plant in layers. A thrush, a waxwing, a warbler and a grouse nest at four heights, so put a canopy tree, a small tree, shrubs and unmown ground together, not one specimen in a lawn.
• Plant for the calendar. Serviceberry for June, elderberry for August, spicebush, dogwood and black gum for the migration, holly, winterberry and sumac for the winter, an oak for the mast and an evergreen.
• Plant in groups. A single spicebush or winterberry is a male or a female; three or more fruit. Thickets, not specimens, hold nests.
• Leave dead wood and litter. Snags, fallen tops and a stick pile; rake nothing under the drip line.
• Water. A shallow basin an inch or two deep, kept clean, in the open.
• Skip the insecticides. White-crowned sparrows that ate the equivalent of a few neonicotinoid-treated seeds lost 6 percent of their body mass in six hours and delayed their migration by three and a half days.
• Cats and glass. Outdoor cats kill about 2.4 billion birds a year in the United States and building glass about 600 million. Keep cats in, and mark any window that reflects the yard with dots or lines no more than 2 inches apart.
• Pull the invasives and do not plant the ornamentals that started them: bush honeysuckle, autumn olive, privet, burning bush, barberry and Callery pear.

Where to start

Plant one oak this fall, with three shrubs under it and a thicket at the edge:

• An oak, from the rare oaks we grow or any oak native to your county.
• Under it, spicebush, flowering dogwood and downy serviceberry.
• Where the winter wind comes from, American holly or a red cedar.
• Along the edge, a thicket of black elderberry or American plum.
• For the edge as one order, the Bird & Berry Hedgerow: serviceberry, elderberry, crabapple, hawthorn, nannyberry, winterberry and chokeberry, fruiting from June to March.
• Put the oak and the three shrubs on a request list and we reply with what is ready and current pricing.

Then stop cutting dead limbs that threaten nothing, stop raking under the trees and stop spraying. Keep the cat in. The bloom and fruit calendar, opened here on this plan, shows the months it leaves without fruit. Count birds in May, and let the tree finder match the rest of the list to your ground.

Common questions

What is the best tree to plant for birds?

An oak, because it raises more caterpillars than any other tree and drops acorns for jays, woodpeckers and turkeys. Put a spicebush, a flowering dogwood and a serviceberry under it.

Which native shrubs have berries for birds in winter?

Winterberry, American holly, staghorn sumac, hackberry, hawthorn and crabapple hold their fruit into winter because birds pass over low-fat fruit in fall. Robins and waxwings work through them once the fatter fruit is gone.

Do native plants really make a difference for birds?

Yes: in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Carolina chickadees held their numbers only in yards where native plants made up more than 70 percent of the plant biomass. Native shrub fruit ran up to 48 percent fat by dry weight against no more than 1 percent for invasive fruit.