Native trees and shrubs for wildlife: what deer, squirrels, bears, bats and turtles get from a planting

By Blue Whale Trees · Updated Oct 24, 2026 · 13 min read

Which native trees and shrubs feed and shelter mammals, reptiles and amphibians, which matter most, and how to plant a yard or woodlot so the animals show up.

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Hard mast is the main event Mast years and the boom and bust behind them White oak acorns are eaten, red oak acorns are buried Soft mast from June to March Browse, and what it means for a planting Bark, cavities and the big old tree Leaf litter, logs and the pool under the canopy Winter cover, water and the way between Why native, and what the ornamentals do instead The species that matter most How to plant for wildlife What to do in fall Common questions Sources

Plant both oak groups in equal numbers, add a hickory and a persimmon, and cage every one of them: that is the whole of a wildlife planting in the East.

Eastern gray squirrel holding an acorn in its front paws, more acorns beside it — An eastern gray squirrel with an acorn, September 2023. Acorns feed more than 150 kinds of wildlife, and animals take most of a white oak crop where it falls. Photo: Dkwikiedt, CC0 (source)

Jump to: The species that matter most · How to plant for wildlife · What to do in fall

For the animals with fur, scales and moist skin, a native tree is food, shelter and a nursery at once, and almost none of that comes from ornamentals. Acorns alone are eaten by more than 150 species of wildlife. In a six-year study in western Massachusetts, 26 of 28 female black bears produced cubs after autumns with a heavy nut and berry crop, and in the poor years 10 of 10 produced none. The litter under a Missouri oak forest holds roughly 3,000 to 5,000 salamanders per acre. This article covers mammals, reptiles and amphibians; birds and insects have their own.

Slender bright green snake stretched across wet, fallen yellow and brown leaves on the forest floor — A green snake in the leaf litter on October 29, 2021. The fallen leaves under native trees shelter reptiles and amphibians as well as the insects they eat. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

Hard mast is the main event

Hard mast is the fat-rich seed that keeps: acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts, beechnuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts. It drops in September and October, and through fall and winter it is the main thing a deer, squirrel, chipmunk or mouse lives on, and what a bear fattens on before denning. In an oak woodland in fall, acorns can be more than 70 percent of what a deer eats, and raccoons make them their most important winter food. White oak acorns are a choice food for white-footed mice, fox squirrels, black bears, red squirrels and cottontails. In one set of studies, animals took 72 to 83 percent of the entire crop.

Hickory nuts are the richer prize. Black bears, red and gray foxes, white-footed mice, chipmunks and rabbits all feed on shagbark hickory nuts. Fox squirrels prefer them from August through October and again in February and March. In some regions hickory nuts are 5 to 10 percent of an eastern chipmunk’s diet.

Black walnut is about a tenth of the fox squirrel’s diet. American beech feeds mice, squirrels, chipmunks, bears, deer and foxes. American hazelnut bears within a few years and gives squirrels, foxes and deer a nut from July, weeks before any acorn. Allegheny chinquapin feeds squirrels, chipmunks, opossums and deer.

Young American beech bur, a yellow ball of soft prickles on a short stalk among broad, toothed leaves — A young American beech bur on May 29, 2024, its soft prickles still yellow. The nuts inside ripen in fall and feed mice, squirrels, chipmunks, bears, deer and foxes. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

The Chinese chestnut we grow for food feeds deer and squirrels too, though it is not a native. If you are choosing one, the differences from the American chestnut matter.

Mast years and the boom and bust behind them

Oaks do not bear evenly. White oak has a good crop every 4 to 10 years by one account and every 3 to 5 by another, and yields swing from nothing to 202,000 acorns per acre. The leading explanation is predator satiation: a failure starves the seed eaters down, and the next flood of acorns is more than the survivors can eat.

In 13 years of records from New York, white-footed mice and chipmunks tracked the previous year’s acorn crop, and black-legged tick nymphs tracked the rodents a year after that; deer numbers had no predictive power. When a gypsy moth outbreak wiped out the acorn crop in Shenandoah National Park, pregnant bears went to den a week earlier and came out a week later.

Black bear high in the crown of an oak among green bristle-tipped leaves — A black bear in the crown of an oak in Shenandoah National Park in mid-September, eating acorns before they drop. In the park, a failed acorn crop sends pregnant bears to den a week early. Photo: NealVickers, CC BY-SA 4.0 (source)

Two things follow for a planter. Mast comes from big crowns: substantial yields are rare from oaks under 25 years old and best from large trees with well-developed crowns. And the two oak groups fail in different years. A March 1955 freeze in east Texas and Louisiana all but wiped out the white-group crop while the red group had a good year. Plant both; the split is the whole point.

“Maintaining an even split between the two oak groups provides a safeguard against a total acorn crop failure in any given year while maximizing acorn production across the forest.” (Mississippi State University Extension, Managing Hardwood Stands for Acorn Production)

White oak acorns are eaten, red oak acorns are buried

The two groups make a different seed, and in tagged-acorn experiments small mammals treated them differently.

Acorn	Tannin	Fat	Sprouts	What a small mammal does
White oak group	about 2 percent	5 to 10 percent	the autumn it falls	eats it on the spot
Red oak group	6 to 10 percent	18 to 25 percent	the following spring	buries it, and it keeps in the cache

Gray squirrels offered artificial acorns picked the low-tannin ones in autumn and the high-fat ones in winter, tannin and all. A gray squirrel that does want to keep a white acorn bites the embryo out of the tip first, and the excised acorn stays sound for up to six months.

On the ground, white oak seedlings clump within a few yards of the parent while red oak seedlings spread much farther. Squirrels, flying squirrels and mice that never came back planted them. So did blue jays that carry small red-group acorns more than half a mile.

Soft mast from June to March

Soft mast is fleshy fruit, and a calendar. Downy serviceberry ripens from June; bears eat it, and squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, mice, foxes and deer eat the fruit or browse the plant. Red mulberry fruits from June to August for opossums, raccoons and both tree squirrels. Black cherry ripens through the summer and is a favorite of black bears; red foxes, raccoons, opossums, squirrels and rabbits take it too. American plum ripens in August and September and its thickets are shelter as well as food. Pawpaw goes from August into October to foxes, opossums, raccoons and squirrels, and black gum feeds bears and foxes.

Raccoon on a bare branch reaching up for ripe orange persimmons — A raccoon reaching for persimmons at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware in mid-November. Raccoons pass the seeds intact and plant the next tree; a deer's rumen destroys them. Photo: Kelly Colgan Azar, via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Public domain (source)

American persimmon ripens from September into November and is the fall fruit for everything at once: squirrels, foxes, skunks, deer, bears, coyotes, raccoons and opossums. At persimmon trees watched by camera in one study, deer made 93 percent of the visits, but a deer’s rumen destroys the seed; the raccoons and coyotes that pass it whole plant the next tree. Hackberry ripens in fall and hangs on the tree until winter or spring. American holly holds fruit through most of the winter, for birds first and deer and squirrels after. Nannyberry and blackhaw feed mammals as well as birds, and American beautyberry holds fruit into winter for raccoons, foxes, opossums and deer.

The low fruit matters as much.

Eastern box turtles eat the fruit of mayapple, black cherry, elderberry, black huckleberry, blueberry, mulberry, blackberry, grape and pokeweed, and pass the seeds. Fungi are 10 to 55 percent of what box turtles eat.

Two eastern box turtles with orange and black patterned shells on bare ground among grass blades and leaf litter — Two eastern box turtles on September 1, 2025. They eat the fruit of black cherry, elderberry, blueberry and mulberry and pass the seeds. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

The persimmon, the pawpaw and the plum go out as a set with a hazelnut, a northern pecan and a black chokeberry: the Native Edible Orchard.

Browse, and what it means for a planting

Browse is twigs, buds and bark, and in the North it is 74 to 91 percent of a deer’s winter diet. Deer reach about 5 feet up, so a sapling is at risk and a tree is not. In the Northeast their preferred woody foods include maple, dogwood, hawthorn, holly, black gum, black cherry, oak, sumac, basswood, hemlock and viburnum. Rabbits take twigs, buds and bark once the green is gone and can girdle a young oak.

Some natives are largely left alone.

Shagbark hickory is seldom browsed unless nothing better is around, and beech is poor deer food. The University of Maryland’s deer-resistant list includes these plants:

There is no deer-proof plant.

Where deer are overabundant they strip the palatable species, the unpalatable ones take over and tree diversity falls; hemlock can stop regenerating altogether. So cage every young tree from the first day, and put the browse-favored species inside the fence and the resistant ones at the edge. Protecting young trees from animals has the hardware.

Young hemlock with flat sprays of short needles inside a round welded-wire cage tied to a wooden stake, dry leaves below — A young eastern hemlock in a welded-wire cage on October 20, 2022. Where deer are many, hemlock can stop regenerating, so each young tree needs a cage. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

Bark, cavities and the big old tree

The endangered Indiana bat spends its summers under the loose bark of dead and dying trees, and the peeling plates of a live shagbark hickory make an excellent alternate roost. It prefers big trees that get direct sun for more than half the day and forms nursery colonies of up to 100 females. The northern long-eared bat, listed as endangered in November 2022, roosts alone or in maternity colonies of 30 to 60 under bark and in the cavities and crevices of live trees and snags. The moths they hunt come from the same trees; see the butterfly and moth article.

Hollow American sycamore trunk with a tall opening at its base into a dark cavity, rotted wood above, mottled bark around it — A hollow American sycamore in July 2022, in full leaf above a cavity big enough to stand in. A hollow living tree is a den tree, the richest shelter a yard can hold. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

“Northern long-eared bats seem to be flexible in selecting roosts, choosing roost trees based on suitability to retain bark or provide cavities or crevices.” (US Fish and Wildlife Service, Northern long-eared bat)

In Pennsylvania 35 species of birds and 20 species of mammals use tree cavities, and only the squirrels and one or two bats cannot do without them. A raccoon den cavity averages 11 by 14 inches and sits 10 to 39 feet up. Southern flying squirrels pile into an old woodpecker hole 15 to 20 at a time in winter, and screech owls use them too.

Gray squirrel peering out of a dark cavity in a gnarled trunk, a dead branch across the opening, leaves around it — A gray squirrel looks out of a cavity in a living trunk on September 7, 2023. Squirrels are among the few animals that cannot do without tree cavities. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

In Shenandoah National Park 84 percent of pregnant black bears denned in live tree cavities, most often in a northern red oak. The den trees averaged 38 inches through, with the entrance 32 feet up. Fungus is not a death sentence for a big tree, and a hollow one away from any target is the most valuable tree on the property; old growth is largely a matter of having them.

Leaf litter, logs and the pool under the canopy

The animals in the litter outnumber everything else. In a Missouri Ozark oak forest, careful counts found 7,300 to 12,900 southern red-backed salamanders per hectare, two to four times the 1975 Hubbard Brook estimate. Rotting logs shelter salamanders, snakes, mice and shrews; at least 19 kinds of salamander and 26 reptiles use logs, stumps, bark and slash piles in Pennsylvania alone.

Eastern red-backed salamander with a rust stripe curled on brown oak leaves — An eastern red-backed salamander on oak litter in Hubbardston, Massachusetts, found under a log in March. The leaves and the log are its whole habitat; it never needs a pond. Photo: Alex Karasoulos, CC BY-SA 4.0 (source)

Eastern box turtles sleep in a shallow form dug in moist litter and burrow under a log in hot weather. From October or November until March they hibernate in stump holes and hollows filled with deep litter. As the cold comes down, they dig deeper. They range over about 4 to 20 acres and die by the thousands on roads and under mowers every year.

Wood frogs winter in rotting logs and stumps or under moss and leaves and freeze solid there, protected by glucose in their tissues. In early spring they and the spotted, Jefferson and blue-spotted salamanders walk to a vernal pool, a fish-free hollow that fills in spring and dries by summer, and breed in a few nights. They spend the other eleven months in the surrounding woods, usually within 600 yards of the pool, under logs, stones, deep litter and canopy shade. Leaf litter, not wood chips and the habitat around a tree cover the litter and the stick pile.

Gray treefrog with pale, lichen-patterned skin flattened against weathered gray wood, its toe pads spread — A gray treefrog on September 12, 2024, matched to weathered wood. It spends the summer in the canopy eating insects and winters under bark and leaf litter, frozen solid like the wood frog. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

Winter cover, water and the way between

Evergreens are winter shelter. Deer in the North gather in yards under closed conifer canopy that cuts wind and snow depth; one Michigan yard held 43,000 deer, and 11,000 died in one hard winter. Eastern hemlock is thermal cover, snow interception and a highly preferred winter browse, which is why it fails to regenerate under heavy deer. Dense eastern red cedar is escape cover for deer and small mammals, and rabbits, foxes, raccoons, skunks and opossums eat its blue cones. Rosebay rhododendron thickets are winter and escape cover for deer, cottontails, bears and grouse. On drier ground, mountain laurel does the same. American holly is the broadleaf evergreen for a yard.

Water sets the map: the old guidance keeps raccoon den trees within a quarter mile of it, and beavers cut within about 300 feet of it, aspen and willow first. Animals also need a way between the pieces: a hedgerow of hazelnut, plum and staghorn sumac along a fence. A strip left unmown between the woods and the neighbor’s does the same, and so does a brush pile at the edge.

Trunk base gnawed by a beaver into an hourglass, the fresh wood bright orange-red against dark bark and fallen leaves — A trunk gnawed by a beaver on November 22, 2023. Beavers cut trees within about 300 feet of water, aspen and willow first. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

Why native, and what the ornamentals do instead

The hard mast species are all natives, and no maple, pear, zelkova or crape myrtle makes a nut. The soft-mast natives feed the animals that plant them; the ornamentals that have escaped mostly feed ticks.

In Connecticut, forest under Japanese barberry held 166 ticks per acre infected with the Lyme bacterium against 20 per acre in adjacent barberry-free forest. The litter under barberry weighed 2.3 tons per acre against 5.0 on plots without it. Around St. Louis, deer used stands of Amur honeysuckle more than uninvaded woods, infected lone star ticks were more numerous there, and cutting the honeysuckle out reduced both.

Deer then carry the seed: more than 70 plant species, several of them invasive introductions, germinated from deer droppings collected over one year in New York. White mulberry hybridizes with the native red mulberry, one more reason not to plant it. Invasive vines and shrubs covers the removal.

Young black bear perched in a black cherry tree loaded with red and black fruit — A young black bear in a black cherry at Cades Cove, Tennessee, at the end of July. Black cherry is the summer fruit for bears, foxes and raccoons. Photo: Kevin Crosby, CC BY-SA 4.0 (source)

The species that matter most

Ranked, with what we grow named.

Oaks, both groups. Ours: swamp chestnut oak and overcup oak for wet ground, and cherrybark oak for the red group. Dwarf chinquapin oak bears within a few years, and bear oak suits small or poor sites. White oak, northern red oak and chestnut oak are the common natives, and ours as well, in our Classic Oaks group.
Hickories. Shagbark for the nuts and the bat bark, northern pecan and shellbark hickory for bottomland. Mockernut and pignut are preferred squirrel mast, and Blue Whale Trees grows both because almost nobody else does.
American beech and black cherry. Beech is the third hard mast and deer mostly leave it alone; black cherry is the summer fruit for bears, foxes and raccoons.
Black walnut, American hazelnut, Allegheny chinquapin. Early nuts.
American persimmon, pawpaw, black gum, the serviceberries, red mulberry, American plum. The fruit calendar, June to November. Hackberry carries it to March, and arrowwood viburnum, gray dogwood and deerberry feed mammals as well as birds.
Evergreens. Eastern hemlock, eastern red cedar, American holly, rosebay rhododendron and mountain laurel, all of which we grow.
Shrubs. Spicebush, nannyberry, blackhaw, black elderberry, black huckleberry, staghorn sumac, American beautyberry, black chokeberry, Washington hawthorn and American crabapple.

Spicebush branch in fall, two small red fruits at a twig among broad yellow leaves spotted brown — Spicebush in fruit on November 1, 2026. Its fat-rich red fruits feed wood thrushes and veeries in fall, and its leaves feed the spicebush swallowtail's caterpillars. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

How to plant for wildlife

Plant a mast orchard with a fruit understory and a shrub edge. Give the oaks and hickories room to grow the wide, sunlit crowns that bear. Plant the two oak groups in equal numbers so a spring freeze cannot take the whole year, and add a hickory even though you may not see nuts for decades. Under and around them put the fruit trees in the order they ripen, serviceberry to persimmon, then the shrubs. Cage everything young; the deer and rabbits you are planting for will otherwise eat the planting.

Keep the dead wood: a snag that is not over a house or a path stays, and a hollow oak is a bear den or a raccoon den in the making.

“Standing dead trees (snags) and dead parts of live trees offer both room and board for many kinds of wildlife.” (Penn State Extension, Dead Wood for Wildlife)

Keep water on the place, and if a low spot under trees floods in spring, leave it. Do not use anticoagulant rodenticides: a poisoned mouse takes days to die and is eaten by foxes, raccoons, skunks, hawks and owls. New York’s wildlife health program logged more than 325 such poisonings from 2012 to 2024. Keep cats indoors; free-ranging cats kill an estimated 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals a year in the United States. Mow high where box turtles live. Pull the barberry and honeysuckle.

Beaver lodge of piled sticks in a pond beside a red maple in full red flower, bare woods and blue sky behind — A beaver lodge on April 12, 2024, a red maple in flower leaning over it. Water sets the map for wildlife, and a beaver pond brings frogs, turtles, ducks and herons to a woodland. Photo: Blue Whale Trees

What to do in fall

Plant acorns of both oak groups the week they drop, under hardware cloth, and a hickory nut or two beside them.
Order a persimmon, a pawpaw and a serviceberry for the understory, and a holly or a rhododendron for winter cover, or let the tree finder pick for your zone and soil.
Cage every sapling before the first frost.
Rake nothing under the trees; pile the prunings; leave the snag.
Put the persimmon, pawpaw, serviceberry, holly and rhododendron on a request list, keep the ones you choose, and we reply with what is ready and current pricing.

Common questions

What is the best tree to plant for wildlife?

An oak, and both groups of them: acorns feed more than 150 kinds of wildlife, white-group acorns are eaten in fall and red-group acorns keep into late winter. Add a hickory and a persimmon, and cage all of them.

Do I need to plant both red and white oaks?

Yes, because the two groups fail in different years: a March 1955 freeze in east Texas and Louisiana all but wiped out the white-group crop while the red group bore well. An even split guards against a total failure in any one year.

Is a hollow tree worth keeping for wildlife?

Yes, where it stands away from a house or a path. In Pennsylvania 35 kinds of birds and 20 kinds of mammals use tree cavities, and in Shenandoah 84 percent of pregnant black bears denned in live hollow trees.

First published Sep 17, 2026

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Sources

(21 references)

Oak dispersal syndromes: do red and white oaks exhibit different dispersal strategies?: Steele, Smallwood and others, USDA Forest Service General Technical Report SRS-73 (2004): acorns feed more than 150 wildlife species, the tannin and fat figures for the two oak groups, squirrels eating white acorns and caching red ones, embryo excision, seedling spacing and jays carrying acorns over a kilometer.
Quercus alba, Fire Effects Information System: USDA Forest Service: white oak acorn crop intervals and yields per acre, which mammals eat the acorns, animals taking 72 to 83 percent of the crop, rabbits girdling stems and acorn fall in September or October.
Carya ovata, Fire Effects Information System: USDA Forest Service: which mammals eat shagbark hickory nuts, the fox squirrel’s preference months, hickory nuts as 5 to 10 percent of a chipmunk’s diet, dispersal by squirrels and chipmunks, and deer seldom browsing hickory.
Odocoileus virginianus, Fire Effects Information System: USDA Forest Service: acorns above 70 percent of the fall diet, browse as 74 to 91 percent of northern winter diets, the 5-foot reach, preferred browse species in the Northeast, mast from large crowns and trees over 25 years, the 1955 freeze, deer as keystone herbivores, conifer yards and the Mead Deer Yard losses.
Ursus americanus, Fire Effects Information System: USDA Forest Service: 26 of 28 Massachusetts females producing cubs after good mast years and 10 of 10 producing none after poor ones, Shenandoah bears denning a week earlier after the acorn failure, 84 percent of pregnant bears denning in live tree cavities, and the bear’s soft mast.
Procyon lotor, Fire Effects Information System: USDA Forest Service: acorns as the raccoon’s most important winter food, cherries, apples and persimmons in the diet, den cavities of 11 by 14 inches at 10 to 39 feet, and den trees within a quarter mile of water.
Terrapene carolina, Fire Effects Information System: USDA Forest Service: the box turtle’s fruits and fungi, seed dispersal, forms in litter, hibernation dates and litter-filled hollows, home ranges and deaths on roads and under mowers.
Climate, deer, rodents, and acorns as determinants of variation in Lyme-disease risk: Ostfeld, Canham, Oggenfuss, Winchcombe and Keesing, PLOS Biology 4 (2006): mice and chipmunks tracking the prior year’s acorns and tick nymphs tracking the rodents a year later, with deer adding no predictive power.
Myotis sodalis, Fire Effects Information System: USDA Forest Service: Indiana bats roosting under loose bark of dead and dying trees, shagbark hickory as an excellent alternate roost, roost tree size and sun, and nursery colonies of up to 100 females.
Northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis): US Fish and Wildlife Service: roosting under bark and in cavities and crevices of live trees and snags, maternity colonies of 30 to 60, the moth-heavy diet and the November 2022 endangered finding.
Dead Wood for Wildlife: Penn State Extension (Hassinger and Payne): 35 bird and 20 mammal species using cavities in Pennsylvania, squirrels and bats as the obligate cavity users, screech owls, and the salamanders, reptiles, snakes, mice and shrews that use rotting logs.
Abundance, biomass production, nutrient content, and the possible role of terrestrial salamanders in Missouri Ozark forest ecosystems (PDF): Semlitsch, O’Donnell and Thompson, Canadian Journal of Zoology 92 (2014), hosted by the USDA Forest Service: 7,300 to 12,900 southern red-backed salamanders per hectare in Ozark oak forest, two to four times the 1975 Hubbard Brook estimate.
Vernal Pools: University of New Hampshire Extension: the obligate pool breeders, eleven months spent within 600 yards of the pool, why fish-free pools matter, and keeping logs, stones, deep litter and canopy shade.
Controlling Japanese barberry: alternative methods and impact on tick populations (PDF): Ward, Williams and Worthley, USDA Forest Service GTR-NRS-P-78 (2011): 166 infected ticks per acre under barberry against 20 in barberry-free forest, and litter of 2.3 tons per acre under barberry against 5.0.
Seed dispersal of Diospyros virginiana in the past and the present: evidence for a generalist evolutionary dispersal syndrome: Rebein and others, Ecology and Evolution 7 (2017), full text at PubMed Central: deer made 93 percent of the camera detections at persimmon trees, and only the raccoons and coyotes passed viable seed.
Seed dispersal by white-tailed deer: implications for long-distance dispersal, invasion, and migration of plants in eastern North America: Myers, Vellend, Gardescu and Marks, Oecologia 139 (2004): more than 70 plant species, several of them invasive introductions, germinated from deer droppings collected over a year in New York.
Invasive honeysuckle eradication reduces tick-borne disease risk by altering host dynamics: Allan and others, PNAS 107 (2010), abstract at the University of Missouri-St. Louis repository: deer used Amur honeysuckle stands more, infected lone star ticks were more numerous there, and removing the honeysuckle reduced both.
Managing Hardwood Stands for Acorn Production: Mississippi State University Extension: an even split between the two oak groups guards against a total acorn failure in any one year.
Rodenticide Toxicity: Cornell Wildlife Health Lab: the days between a rodent eating an anticoagulant bait and dying, the foxes, raccoons, skunks, hawks and owls poisoned by eating it, and the more than 325 New York cases from 2012 to 2024.
The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States: Loss, Will and Marra, Nature Communications 4 (2013): free-ranging cats kill an estimated 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals a year in the contiguous United States.
Deer-Resistant Native Plants: University of Maryland Extension: pawpaw, spicebush, sweet pepperbush, American holly, sweetbay magnolia, blackhaw, black elderberry and eastern red cedar among its deer-resistant natives, and the warning that no plant is deer-proof.