Birds Love These 2 Colors – Add Them to Your Garden Palette to Attract More Feathered Friends

Feeders, water, and shelter. Most gardeners stop there when it comes to birds. Plant color barely gets a mention, which is a shame because birds growing plants in colors that birds like is one of the best ways to attract feathered friends to your garden. But birds don't see the same way we do, so they have different color preferences.

Birds have UV vision, process contrast differently than humans, plus a few million years of co-evolving with flowering plants has baked certain color associations into their behavior. These associations translate directly into which gardens they visit and which ones they fly right past.

Understanding bird preferences for specific colors is an underutilized trick to attract birds to your yard. Get the palette right and you're speaking their language. Get it wrong and you've planted a beautiful garden that birds mostly ignore. Here are the best (and worst) color plants to grow, if you want to bring more birds to your garden.

Best Colors to Attract Birds

There are two colors in particular that many birds flock to. They signal an abundance of food and can even aid in camouflage, which makes them extremely attractive to birds.

If you want to invite more winged guests into your garden, be sure you include plenty of plants in these two hues.

Red

Hummingbirds have a near-automatic response to red – and there's a reason for it. Many pollinating insects see red poorly, so plants that evolved red flowers were essentially filtering their nectar away from bees and butterflies, reserving it specifically for long-beaked birds. Hummingbirds figured this out over generations.

Red came to mean a relatively untouched and reliable nectar source. That association stuck hard on both sides of the equation, which is why it remains true even in gardens far removed from any plant's native range.

Red gets a faster first look than most other colors. Cardinal flowers, red salvia, trumpet vine. Even an unexpected pop of red in the garden from something other than a plant – like a red hummingbird feeder from Amazon, a ceramic pot, or a painted stake – can pull hummingbirds in for a closer look.

Beyond nectar feeders, though, red-berried plants like winterberry, holly, and red-berried elderberry do serious work in fall and winter. Robins, cedar waxwings, and thrushes all rely on them once other food sources thin out and those berries are the only reliable food left. Red plants have cross-season, cross-species appeal. That's hard to beat.

Yellow

Yellow is strongly associated with high protein birdseed-producing plants, and seed-eating birds have learned to pay attention to it. Goldfinches are the obvious starting point.

While feeding on a yellow coneflower or black-eyed Susan, a goldfinch may also get some camouflage from the bloom. A bird that's harder to spot is a bird that sticks around longer in your garden. So a bright yellow bird on a bright yellow flower is a less obvious target for a passing hawk or other predator.

Sunflower heads, yellow-seeded grasses, and late-season rudbeckia are beloved by pine siskins, house finches, and sparrows. Yellow flowers also hold up well in low morning light, which matters because that's when a lot of birds are doing their most active foraging.

One thing worth knowing, though, is that scattered yellow plants don't signal much. A mass planting of black-eyed Susans reads as a genuine food source in a way that three isolated specimens simply don’t. The difference in bird traffic between the two is noticeable.

Pairing a planting like that with a tube seed feeder like this from Amazon keeps finches and sparrows coming back all season, even through the gaps between bloom cycles.

Worst Colors to Attract Birds

Birds can be picky about the colors they like, but there are specific evolutionary reasons for that. That’s not to say you shouldn’t plant colors that don’t attract birds.

But if bringing in more winged visitors is your main goal in gardening, consider leaving these colors out of your planting palette or using them alongside hues birds prefer.

White

White flowers can lack contrast in bright light, making blooms less visually distinct to birds than warmer colors. Birds depend on shape and contrast to identify food sources fast and a pure white flower in direct sun fails to stand out clearly against a bright background. The landing cues aren't the same as they are with red or yellow flowers, particularly in the strong morning light during which most birds are actively foraging.

This doesn't make white plants useless. In shaded spots or at dusk, white flowers actually stand out well. That’s why white-flowering plants often attract night-feeding moths and, occasionally, nocturnal birds. But if your goal is afternoon hummingbird or finch activity on a sunny patio, pure white is probably the least efficient color choice in the border.

White flowers with a contrasting center – like a daisy with a yellow disc – perform better than flat, solid white blooms. The contrast restores the visual cue birds need, giving them something to lock onto rather than a wash of reflected light.

Dark Blue & Purple

Cooler hues of blue and purple are less visually striking at a distance than red or yellow, which is the core issue for bird attraction. They're also relatively rare among bird-pollinated plants.

Most blue and purple flowers evolved to attract insects rather than birds, so there's less of a built-in association pulling birds toward them. A big solid patch of blue or purple simply doesn't register as a feeding opportunity for birds the way a stand of red salvia or yellow rudbeckia does.

Salvias and alliums are perfectly good garden plants, but they're not nearly as effective at attracting birds as red or yellow plants are. Purple and blue flowers aren’t useless, though.

Heavy pollinator traffic on purple and blue flowers can pull insect-eating birds in secondhand, which is worth something. But if birds are your main goal, blue works better as an accent than a feature.

Surround blue and purple flowers with red and yellow blooms and the overall planting will still be warm enough to be welcoming to birds. The mix of cool and warm colors should attract all kinds of beneficial insects and birds to your garden.

Colorful Bird Garden Essentials