How to attract songbirds to your yard (and hear them)

To attract songbirds, give them what a feeder cannot: native plants that host caterpillars and hold seed heads through winter, water that moves, cover like a brush pile or a dense shrub, and a yard with no pesticides. Then add feeders by target: black-oil sunflower for cardinals, chickadees and finches, nyjer for goldfinches, suet for woodpeckers and nuthatches. Keep cats indoors and mark your windows. Within a season you will hear more birds than you see: goldfinch flight calls, chickadee whistles, a cardinal at dawn, a wren that will not stop.

Start with plants, not feeders

The biggest change is the one people skip. Audubon's guidance for a bird-friendly yard puts insects first: 96 percent of land birds feed their chicks on bugs, largely caterpillars that live on native plants. Audubon names native oaks, willows, birches and maples as the trees that host them. A lawn ringed with ornamentals from other continents looks green and feeds almost nothing.

Think in four kinds of food across the year. Bugs from native trees in spring, when everything is feeding young. Fruit from serviceberry and cherry in summer, dogwood and spicebush for migrants in fall, cedar and holly in winter. Seeds from native sunflowers, asters and coneflowers, which Audubon notes pull in finches and sparrows. Nectar from columbine and penstemon for hummingbirds. Audubon suggests grouping five or more of one plant together and building layers: canopy, shrubs, low plants, leaf litter.

Then do less. Do not deadhead flowers; the seed heads feed birds in fall and winter. Leave fallen leaves as mulch, where insects overwinter. If a dead tree cannot hit anything, leave it standing: Audubon lists woodpeckers, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and bluebirds among the birds that nest in dead wood.

Water that moves

Every bird needs water, including the warblers, thrushes and vireos that never touch a feeder, so a bath brings in species seed cannot. Audubon's yard guidance mentions anything from a hollowed boulder that catches rain to an ordinary bird bath, and singles out the sound of running water as especially attractive, above all to migrants. A cheap dripper or a small solar fountain turns a birdbath into a sound birds can find from across the block. Put it near a shrub, and keep it clean.

Feeders, matched to the bird you want

Feeders are the fast part. Each seed and feeder design selects for different birds, so buy for the species you want to hear.

The University of Florida's extension guide calls black-oil sunflower the best all-around seed: small, thin-shelled and easy for chickadees, titmice, wrens and finches to crack. If you own one feeder, fill a tube with that. Goldfinches, Purple Finches and Pine Siskins pick nyjer over almost anything else, and the tiny seed needs a feeder with very small ports. Suet in a wire cage is the woodpecker feeder; the guide lists woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, titmice, wrens, jays, bluebirds and cardinals among its regulars, especially in winter. Use no-melt suet in summer.

Placement matters too. The same guide recommends feeders 10 to 15 feet from shrubs, close enough for an escape but too far for a cat to ambush from cover, and cleaning every two to three weeks with a 10 percent bleach solution. Platform feeders need it most, since droppings and seed mix on an open tray.

Shelter: the brush pile

Songbirds stay where they can hide. Dense shrubs and evergreens do part of the job; a brush pile in a back corner does the rest, free. Audubon's instructions: lay the biggest logs down first, pile large branches loosely on top, keep stacking in layers, and leave open pockets rather than packing the brush tight. Birds shelter in it through heat, cold and storms all year, and Audubon's yard guidance adds that fallen wood feeds the insects that feed the birds. This is what pulls ground birds out of the neighbor's hedge: sparrows, juncos, towhees and, above all, wrens.

Take away the things that kill them

No pesticides

Audubon's rule is that a bird-friendly garden is a bug-friendly garden. Spraying for insects removes the caterpillars nearly all land birds need for their chicks. If a plant is being eaten, that is the plan working.

Cats indoors

A 2013 study estimated that cats in the United States kill between 1.3 and 3.7 billion birds a year, most of them taken by unowned cats. A cat that lives inside, or goes out on a leash or in a screened catio, is off that list. Feeding birds while a cat roams is baiting a trap.

Windows

Audubon cites a 2014 study putting building collisions at 365 million to one billion bird deaths a year in the US, and a yard full of birds means more traffic past your glass. Birds cannot tell a reflection from open air, so break it up: dots, tape or decals spaced 2 to 4 inches apart across the whole pane, external screens, or blinds kept closed. Move indoor plants back from windows, and put feeders on the glass or within about 3 meters of it, the extension guide's rule, so a startled bird has no room to build speed. Collisions peak during migration and the breeding season.

What you will start hearing

The payoff arrives by ear first. Within weeks of a sunflower feeder the chickadee's call is part of the morning and the cardinal whistles from the tallest tree at dawn. Nyjer adds the goldfinch's flight call overhead. Suet adds woodpecker taps and the nuthatch's nasal honk. The brush pile adds a wren, the first and last voice of every day, and a House Finch will claim the gutter and sing a long warble that ends in a buzz.

Native plants change the sound more slowly and more completely. In a few years the yard gets the birds you did not plan for: catbirds mewing from the shrubs, a House Wren bubbling in a nest box, warblers passing through in May and September, a Song Sparrow on the fence. That is the chorus a feeder alone never delivers.

When a new voice turns up and you cannot place it, stand at the window and let Warble listen: it names the bird while it sings and adds it to your state album, one free catch a day, a fair pace for a yard that keeps adding birds.

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Questions people ask

Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.