Plant guide by bird

Plants for Downy Woodpeckers

Plants for downy woodpeckers are mostly about wood: the diet is mainly insects — beetle larvae inside wood or bark, ants and caterpillars — with about a quarter plant material such as berries, acorns and grain ¹.

Downies nest in dead trees or dead parts of live trees, typically a small stub about 7 inches across, softened by fungus ¹ — so the best plant is often the one you do not cut down. Growing facts are from the Wildflower Center [3–7], the native-plant case is Audubon's ².

Downy woodpecker — plants for downy woodpeckers mean dead wood, insects and winter berries — Photo: Paul Danese, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Plants for downy woodpeckers: trees with insects and nest stubs

Downies live in open deciduous woodlands, orchards, parks and suburbs, and feed along fencerows and among tall weeds ¹. Paper birch, short-lived and prone to the bronze birch borer ³, is exactly the kind of tree that produces the beetle larvae and soft dead stubs downies use; American beech is long-lived with nesting sites and cover ⁴. Both host caterpillars, the food nesting birds need most ². In late summer downies hammer plant galls on goldenrod for the fly larva inside ¹ — leave a patch of goldenrod standing.

Berries and cover

Virginia creeper's fruit feeds woodpeckers through the winter, by name on the Wildflower Center's list ⁵; flowering dogwood's red fruit is listed for birds ⁶; eastern red cedar gives evergreen cover and a staple berry ⁷. At feeders they prefer suet, then sunflower, peanuts and peanut butter 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

Paper Birch →Cardinal Flower →Trumpet Honeysuckle →American Elderberry →Canadian Serviceberry →Flowering Dogwood →Winterberry →Common Sunflower →Native plants for birds →Berry plants for birds →Seed plants for birds →Nectar plants for birds →Shelter plants for birds →

Frequently asked questions

What trees attract downy woodpeckers?

Trees with dead limbs or stubs — they nest in dead wood about 7 inches across — plus birch, beech and any native tree rich in insects ¹³.

Do downy woodpeckers eat berries?

Yes, about a quarter of the diet is plant material; Virginia creeper and dogwood are listed for birds ¹⁵.