Plant guide by bird

Plants for House Finches

Plants for house finches are seed, bud and fruit plants: House Finches eat almost exclusively plant material — seeds, buds and fruit including wild mustard, knotweed, thistle and mulberry, and orchard fruit — and feed their nestlings entirely plant foods, which is rare among birds ¹.

Growing facts below are from the Wildflower Center [3–8], the native-plant case is Audubon's ².

Male house finch — plants for house finches are seed heads, buds and fruit — Photo: Paul Danese, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Plants for house finches: seed heads

At feeders they take black-oil sunflower over striped, plus millet and milo ¹; in the garden, common sunflower's seeds are sought by many wild birds ³, and purple coneflower ⁴ and black-eyed susan ⁵ hold composite seed into winter. Leave the heads standing. The red of a male house finch comes from pigments in its food during molt, so a yard rich in colored fruit and seed literally makes redder males ¹.

Fruit and nesting plants

Mulberry is on the All About Birds diet list ¹: red mulberry fruits for birds over a long season ⁶. Trumpet honeysuckle's berries attract Purple Finch and goldfinch ⁷, finches with the same tastes. House finches nest in deciduous and coniferous trees and on buildings and hanging planters ¹; a small conifer such as eastern red cedar is a typical site ⁸.

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

Common Sunflower →Purple Coneflower →Black-eyed Susan →Cardinal Flower →Trumpet Honeysuckle →American Elderberry →Canadian Serviceberry →Flowering Dogwood →Native plants for birds →Berry plants for birds →Seed plants for birds →Nectar plants for birds →Shelter plants for birds →

Frequently asked questions

What plants attract house finches?

Sunflower and other seed heads, mulberry and fruit, and small conifers to nest in ¹³⁶.

Why are some male house finches yellow?

Red comes from pigments in the diet during molt; males on pigment-poor food come out orange or yellow ¹.