yardener logo - click to go to home page
Yardener's Advisor Newsletter: Sign In / Subscribe


Search Yardener

  • Home
  • Find Info
    • Plant Helper
    • Plant And Pest Problem Solver
    • Toolshed of Products
    • Buy Books And Videos By Jeff Ball
    • Watch Yardening Videos By Jeff Ball
    • Nancy's Blog
    • About Us
  • Ask Nancy! (Free Q&A)
    • Ask A Question For Free!
    • View A List Of Answered Questions
  • Free Monthly Newsletter Subscription!
    • Sign Up
    • About
  • Free Videos
  • Want To Help Us?

    • 1) Donate Via PayPal
    • 2) Share This
  • Looking For Products?
    • 1) Shop At amazon.com logo

Home Page > Yardener's Plant Helper > Essential Steps For Success > Attracting Birds To The Yard > Plants for Songbirds

Plants for Songbirds

Whether they are just visiting or staying to raise a family, birds benefit our yards directly by consuming vast quantities of pest insects and weed seeds. Birds also provide delightful color, movement and song. Learning about different birds and their lifestyles and food preferences increases our enjoyment of our yards. Pleasant as this sounds, there’s a note of urgency, too. As open spaces such as woodlands, meadows and fields continue to fall under development, birds must rely more and more on suburban yards for food, water, and shelter. Just about any yard will attract some local neighborhood birds such as sparrows, starlings, and robins, which have adjusted to our housing and our suburban lawn monoculture. But any other birds are not so fortunate. We can and should attract many more kinds of birds by planting trees, shrubs, and flowers that supply the diverse needs of many bird species, including migrants that will stop by on their way to and from their seasonal homes. This file offers some suggestions on how to do this.

What Birds Eat

In other files, we discuss how to attract birds by feeding them with seed, suet cake, fruit slices, stale bread and other foods to supplement their natural diet. In selecting particular plants for birds, we ensure a long-range supply of buds, flowers, berries, fruits, grains, nuts, cones, seeds, sap, and even nectar for hummingbirds. The birds will find abundant insect food on these plants as well.
Plants that retain their fruits and berries over much of the winter are especially important. For example, a recent study of nearly 70 species of migrating birds along the southern New England coastline found that most of them switched form eating insects during the breeding season to mostly fruits and berries (such as arrowwood, bayberry, and pokeweed) for the long flight to their Latin American wintering grounds.

  • read more:
  • Plan For Plants
  • Some Plant Ideas


Do you have a gardening question? Ask Nancy



Our Privacy Policy       Contact Us

©2003-2021 Yardener.com, All Rights Reserved
YARDENER is a registered service mark
copyright material is protected by copyscape.com, do not copy our content without permission