Choosing Plants That Attract Birds

Planting a few big flowering grevilleas will bring birds, but probably not the ones you were hoping for. It reliably produces noisy miners, rainbow lorikeets and not much else, because those species are aggressive, they defend a rich nectar source, and they drive smaller birds out of the garden entirely. Getting wrens, finches, thornbills and honeyeaters back takes a different approach, and most of it is about structure rather than flowers.

What birds actually need from a garden

Birds need four things and most gardens supply only one. Food matters, but so does shelter from predators, somewhere safe to nest, and water. The gardens with the widest variety of birds are the ones with layers: a canopy overhead, a middle storey of dense shrubs between roughly 1 and 3m, and a rough groundcover layer of tussocks and leaf litter.

The classic Australian backyard has a canopy tree and a mown lawn with nothing in between. That layout suits large, bold, open country birds and excludes almost everything small. If you plant nothing else this year, plant the missing middle storey.

Nectar through the year, including the winter gap

Honeyeaters are the easiest birds to attract, provided something is in flower most of the year. Nearly every garden has a spring nectar surplus and a late autumn to winter famine, so plan backwards from winter.

• Coast banksia (Banksia integrifolia). Cream candles through autumn and winter, 6 to 15m, salt and wind tolerant. The single most valuable winter nectar plant for eastern Australia.
• Heath banksia (Banksia ericifolia). Orange spikes in autumn and winter on a dense 3 to 5m shrub that doubles as shelter.
• Grevillea 'Honey Gem' and 'Moonlight'. Large tree grevilleas at 4 to 6m, flowering most of the year. Use them, just not as the only thing.
• Silky oak (Grevillea robusta). Golden combs in October and November on a fast growing tree that reaches 20 to 35m. Acreage or a large block only.
• Bottlebrush (Callistemon viminalis and cultivars). Spring and often a second autumn flush, 2 to 8m depending on cultivar, and untroubled by heavy clay.
• Correa and native fuchsia. Small tubular flowers in autumn and winter at 1 to 2m, and specifically suited to smaller honeyeaters like eastern spinebills.
• Eucalyptus and Corymbia. Where you have the room, a flowering gum is a nectar supermarket that feeds lorikeets, honeyeaters and flying foxes alike.

Seed and fruit, which feed a different set of birds

Nectar plants attract honeyeaters and lorikeets. Seed and fruit bring in the finches, pigeons, cockatoos and bowerbirds that most people never see.

• She oaks (Allocasuarina and Casuarina). Cones are the primary food of glossy black cockatoos, and the fine foliage gives excellent shelter. Sizes range from 4m shrubs to 20m trees.
• Lilly pilly (Syzygium australe, S. luehmannii). Heavy crops of pink to red fruit in summer that feed figbirds, bowerbirds and koels, on plants that also make first rate screens.
• Blueberry ash (Elaeocarpus reticulatus). Fringed bells then blue berries, on a slim 6 to 10m tree that fits a suburban block comfortably.
• Tuckeroo (Cupaniopsis anacardioides). Orange capsules with black seed, on a tough 8 to 10m coastal tree with a neat dense crown.
• Native grasses and Lomandra. Poa, Themeda and Lomandra seed heads feed finches and provide nesting material. Leave them uncut through summer.
• Acacia species. Seed with a fatty attachment that many birds take directly, plus insects living in the foliage.

Do not overlook insects. Most small birds are insectivores, and a large share of what a honeyeater actually eats is spiders and small invertebrates gleaned from bark and leaves. Rough barked trees, leaf litter left in beds and a garden not sprayed with broad spectrum insecticide will do more for bird numbers than another flowering shrub.

The layer most gardens are missing

Small birds will not cross open ground. They move through a garden along connected cover, and if there is a 10m gap of lawn between the fence line and the nearest shrub, they simply will not come.

What they want is dense, twiggy, ideally prickly shrubs from about 1 to 3m tall, planted in groups rather than as single specimens, and joined up into a continuous run.

• Blackthorn (Bursaria spinosa), 2 to 4m, thorny, cream summer flower and superb small bird habitat.
• Prickly leaved hakeas such as Hakea laurina or Hakea sericea, 3 to 5m.
• Dense small grevilleas like 'Bronze Rambler' or Grevillea rosmarinifolia, 1 to 2m.
• Coastal rosemary (Westringia fruticosa), 1 to 1.5m, and one of the toughest fillers available.
• Tea tree (Leptospermum) thickets, 2 to 4m, dense and fine twigged.
• Melaleuca thickets on damp ground.

Plant these in clumps of three to seven of the same species rather than one of each. Birds respond to volume and density, not to variety of labels.

The grevillea trap

Noisy miners are native, aggressive, and thrive in exactly the landscape most Australians build: scattered tall trees over open mown grass, with plenty of large flowered nectar plants. Once a colony establishes, it will chase off every smaller bird within its territory, and no amount of extra planting fixes it while the structure stays open.

The counter is dense understorey. Miners avoid thick shrubbery because they cannot manoeuvre in it, and small birds thrive there. If you are already miner dominated, adding dense mid storey shrubs along the boundaries and reducing open lawn is the intervention that actually shifts the balance. It takes two or three seasons.

Grevilleas still earn a place once the understorey exists. Plant Drop's guide to grevilleas and bird attracting plants covers choosing and growing them alongside the other nectar plants that feed birds.

Water, and what not to do

A bird bath is close to the cheapest habitat improvement available, and in a hot dry summer it will outperform any plant you own. Place it 1 to 2m from cover so birds have an escape route, but not directly under dense shrubbery where a cat can wait. Raise it off the ground, keep it shallow at 30 to 50mm with a rough surface for grip, and clean it weekly.

Skip the seed feeder. Feeding concentrates aggressive species, spreads disease at the feeding point, and produces poor nutrition. A garden that feeds birds from living plants is healthier and far more interesting to watch.

Keep cats in, especially at dawn and dusk. No planting scheme survives an outdoor cat.

A workable plan for a suburban block

Start along the boundaries, because that is where dense planting is least in the way. Run a continuous band of mid storey shrubs 2 to 3m deep down at least one long boundary, using three or four species in drifts. Add one or two canopy trees for nectar or seed, positioned so the shade falls somewhere useful. Fill the front of the shrub band with tussock grasses and let the leaf litter stay where it falls.

Sequence the flowering so something is out in every month, with particular attention to May through August. Then put the water in.

Advanced stock matters more here than in most planting, because a habitat garden only works once the shrub layer has actual bulk. A screening shrub planted at 45L already carries the density a small bird needs, rather than needing four years to get there. Everything we supply is delivered and planted by our team as one job, which is set out on our supplied and installed page.

Where to start

Our bird attracting plant collection gathers the nectar, seed and fruit producers that perform in eastern Australian gardens, and the broader native plant range covers the shelter species and grasses that fill out the middle and lower layers. If you are choosing the canopy tree that anchors the whole scheme, read our guide to native trees for Australian backyards first. Many of these species also happen to be drought hardy, which is covered in our guide to low water gardens that still look good.

Plant the missing middle layer along one boundary, make sure something flowers in winter, add water, and give it two seasons. That sequence brings back more species than any single plant choice ever will.