Plant guide by bird

Plants for Blue Jays

Plants for blue jays begin with oaks: jays occur in all kinds of forests but especially near oaks, their diet is mostly acorns, nuts, seeds, grain and fruit, and All About Birds' advice is that planting oak trees will make acorns available for jays of the future ¹.

Oaks are not yet profiled on this site; the five natives below are. Growing facts are from the Wildflower Center [3–7], the native-plant case is Audubon's ².

Blue jay — plants for blue jays start with oaks and nut trees — Photo: Sixflashphoto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Plants for blue jays: nuts and mast

Stomach contents are about 22 percent insect over the year, with acorns, nuts, fruit and grain nearly all the rest ¹. American beech produces beechnuts among the most important wildlife foods and offers nesting sites and cover ³; Audubon's oak figure — over 500 caterpillar species on a native oak — is the reason to add an oak beside it ². Jays cache what they cannot eat, so a nut tree feeds them through winter.

Fruit and nesting trees

Fruit is part of the diet ¹: flowering dogwood ⁴, red mulberry ⁵ and American elderberry ⁶ all fruit for birds. Jays build in the crotch or thick outer branches of a deciduous or coniferous tree, usually 10–25 feet up ¹; eastern red cedar provides that cover and nesting material ⁷. Jays often drink from birdbaths, and at feeders prefer peanuts, sunflower and suet on a tray or hopper ¹.

Why native plants first

Native plants are those that occur naturally in the region where they evolved, and Audubon calls them the ecological basis on which birds depend: without them and the insects that co-evolved with them, local birds cannot survive ². The scale matters — a native oak supports over 500 species of caterpillars where a ginkgo hosts five, and it takes more than 6,000 caterpillars to raise one brood of chickadees ². Most nursery landscaping plants are alien species, so choosing natives is the single landscaping decision with the clearest effect on bird populations ².

The alternative is what most yards already have. Audubon notes that manicured lawn now covers over 40 million acres of the United States as a green monoculture, that the traditional suburban lawn carries on average ten times more chemical pesticide per acre than farmland, and that the continental U.S. has lost 150 million acres of habitat and farmland to sprawl ². Every bed of natives that replaces turf is habitat that lawn cannot be, and long-lived native trees such as oaks and maples also store carbon ².

Check the native range before buying: the Wildflower Center record for this species lists the states and provinces where it occurs naturally ³, and Audubon's zip-code native plant database narrows that to your area and the bird groups each plant attracts ². Once established, native plants generally need little maintenance and far less water than lawn, and they do not need the pesticides that make a yard poor bird habitat ².

More plant guides

American Elderberry →Canadian Serviceberry →Flowering Dogwood →Winterberry →American Holly →Eastern Redcedar →Virginia Creeper →American Beech →Red Mulberry →Native plants for birds →Berry plants for birds →Seed plants for birds →Nectar plants for birds →Shelter plants for birds →

Frequently asked questions

What is the best tree for blue jays?

An oak — All About Birds says planting oaks makes acorns available for future jays; beech nuts are the next best mast ¹³.

Do blue jays eat berries?

Yes, fruit is part of the diet; dogwood, mulberry and elderberry all fruit for birds ¹⁴.