A bird-friendly garden is not a garden with a feeder in it. It is a garden with somewhere to hide, something to eat in every season and clean water, planted in layers the way the bush is. This guide explains why small birds have left most Australian suburbs, which plants bring them back, and the handful of habits that undo everything else.
Why small birds have disappeared from Australian suburbs
This is the thing worth understanding before choosing a single plant. Most Australian suburbs have plenty of nectar, largely from garden grevilleas and bottlebrush, and almost no dense low cover. That combination favours large aggressive honeyeaters, particularly noisy miners, which thrive in open gardens with tall trees over mown grass and actively exclude smaller species. The result is gardens full of miners, lorikeets and currawongs, and empty of fairy-wrens, thornbills, finches and silvereyes.
The single most effective thing a home garden can do is plant dense, prickly, mid-height shrubs that small birds can shelter inside and miners cannot penetrate: hakea, bursaria, prickly acacia species and dense grevilleas. Shelter is scarcer than food.
Choose native plants
By selecting native shrubs, trees and flowering plants, you support the birds' natural diet and offer familiar shelter. Kangaroo paw, grevilleas and banksias are the classic nectar plants, and wallaby grass, lomandra and dianella feed the seed-eaters. Our full list of top bird-attracting native plants for Australian gardens ranks them by how much nectar they actually produce, which varies far more between species than the labels suggest.
Local species beat generic natives. A grevillea bred for huge flowers feeds miners and lorikeets; a local small-flowered grevillea or a correa feeds the spinebills and honeyeaters that the big birds push out.
Plant all four layers
| Layer | What it provides |
|---|---|
| Canopy trees | Nectar, lookout perches, hollows over decades |
| Dense mid-storey shrubs | Shelter for small birds, the missing layer |
| Ground layer and grasses | Seed, insects, foraging cover |
| Leaf litter and logs | Invertebrates, which feed most small birds |
Aim to include a spectrum of native trees and shrubs, such as wattles, bottlebrushes and melaleucas, that offer shade and flower heavily, inviting the insects that feed nestlings. Dense, prickly shrubs matter as much as flowering ones, because small birds need somewhere safe from cats, and a mixed screen planted along a boundary does that job while also giving you privacy. Plant the shrub layer in groups of three or five of the same species rather than one of everything; a single hakea is a perch, a thicket of them is a home.
Feed them through the lean season
Winter and early spring are hardest. Banksias, correas, many grevilleas and some wattles flower then, and planting two or three species with staggered flowering keeps nectar available for most of the year. That matters more than a single spectacular summer display. Banksia 'Narrow Nugget' is a compact form, about 1.5 metres, that flowers through the cooler months in a small garden. Seed-eating birds need grasses left to seed, and insectivorous birds need insects, which means not spraying.
Mulch, litter and the untidy corner
A mulched bed holds moisture for the plants and shelters the beetles, spiders and larvae that most small birds live on; a bare bed does neither. Use a coarse, chunky mulch rather than fine material that mats, keep it clear of stems, and let leaf litter build up under the shrubs instead of raking it. Leave seed heads standing into autumn and keep a dead branch or a small log pile somewhere out of the way. A garden that looks slightly untamed in autumn is a garden that is working.
Water, done safely
Food and shelter get you visitors; water keeps them. A shallow bird bath with a rough surface for grip, positioned in dappled shade within a couple of metres of cover so birds can escape quickly, will be used more heavily than any feeder. Top it up daily in summer and scrub it weekly.
- Put a stick or rocks in every water container so bees and small birds can climb out. Drowning in steep-sided bowls is common.
- Raise bird baths and keep them clear of cover a cat could hide in.
- Change the water regularly. Stagnant water spreads disease between birds and breeds mosquitoes.
- Provide shade over the bath so the water does not overheat in an Australian summer.
The same principles scale up in our guide to creating an animal-friendly garden.
Do not feed birds
Worth stating plainly because it is well intentioned and genuinely harmful. Bread causes serious nutritional disease, and mince fed to magpies and kookaburras lacks calcium and causes bone deformities in young birds. Feeding also concentrates birds unnaturally, which spreads disease, and encourages aggressive species to dominate. Plant nectar, seed and habitat instead. It works better and does no harm.
The things that undo everything else
- Free-roaming cats are the largest garden-scale threat to Australian birds. Containment, particularly at night, makes an enormous difference.
- Metaldehyde snail baits kill birds and lizards. Use iron-EDTA pellets.
- Broad-spectrum insecticides remove the insects small birds eat.
- Loose or wide-mesh fruit netting traps and kills birds and flying foxes. Use wildlife-safe netting under 5 mm mesh, pulled taut; it is legally required in some Australian states.
- Phosphorus fertiliser kills the grevilleas and banksias the birds came for. Use low-phosphorus native blends only.
- Large unmarked windows cause collisions. Decals or screens help.
Keep it going
Walk the garden once a week with a cup of tea and notice who is using it. Fairy-wrens and thornbills working the shrub layer mean the shelter is right; only miners and lorikeets mean the cover is still too thin. Replace a shrub that dies with the same species, prune the screen so it stays dense to the ground, and resist the urge to tidy the corner the birds have chosen.
Ready to plant?
Start with our bird attracting collection, browse the wider native plants range, or add flowering shrubs for the nectar layer from plants that attract bees and butterflies. Planting in numbers is cheapest from tubestock, and every plant is backed by our 30 day satisfaction guarantee. If native food is part of the plan, our guide to bush tucker plants for the home garden sorts the realistic backyard crops by climate, with notes on taste, yield and the plants to treat with caution.
