Plant guide by bird

Plants for Mourning Doves

Plants for mourning doves serve two needs: seed on open ground — seeds are 99 percent of the diet, from cultivated grains and wild grasses to weeds and herbs ¹ — and dense foliage to nest in.

All About Birds' backyard advice is to plant dense shrubs or evergreens for nesting sites ¹; growing facts are from the Wildflower Center [3–6], the native-plant case is Audubon's ².

Mourning dove on the ground — plants for mourning doves are seed on open ground and evergreens to nest in — Photo: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Plants for mourning doves: seed on the ground

Doves feed on the ground in grasslands, fields, backyards and roadsides, pecking or pushing aside litter, and a dove eats roughly 12 to 20 percent of its body weight in seed a day ¹. Common sunflower, whose seeds are sought by many wild birds and which gives cover mixed with other annuals ³, drops seed doves clean up; black-eyed susan's seed for granivorous birds does the same on a smaller scale ⁶. Native grasses left to seed, and a patch of bare ground, complete the picture.

Evergreens to nest in

Doves nest amid dense foliage on the branch of an evergreen, orchard tree or vine, and a pair can raise up to six broods a year ¹. Eastern red cedar provides nesting material and cover ⁴; American holly provides cover and nesting sites ⁵. Keep cats indoors — birds that spend much of their time on the ground are particularly vulnerable to prowling cats 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

Common Sunflower →Purple Coneflower →Eastern Redcedar →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 mourning doves?

Seed plants on open ground — sunflower, grasses — and dense evergreens like red cedar and holly to nest in ¹⁴.

Where do mourning doves nest?

Amid dense foliage in evergreens, orchard trees and vines, and readily on gutters and eaves; up to six broods a year ¹.