Backyard Birds in Iowa: A Field Guide to the Species at Your Feeder

Drive across Iowa in summer and you’ll mostly see corn and soybeans — the state is about as thoroughly farmed as anywhere in the country. That’s not necessarily bad news for backyard birders, though. Iowa’s mix of farmland, scattered woodlots, and the wooded river valleys along the Mississippi and Missouri actually supports a solid variety of feeder birds, especially where a patch of native habitat survives next to the fields.

What Iowa lacks in mountains or coastline, it makes up for with genuinely dramatic seasons — hot, humid summers and cold, often brutal winters — and that seasonal swing shapes which birds you’ll see and when.

The State Bird: American Goldfinch

Iowa’s state bird is the American Goldfinch, a year-round resident here that molts into its brilliant yellow breeding plumage each spring. In winter the males lose that bright color and can be genuinely hard to pick out from the females, so a lot of people are surprised to learn the drab little finch at their feeder in January is the same species as the bright yellow one that shows up in June.

Prairie and Farmland Birds

Iowa’s remaining prairie remnants and grassy roadside ditches still support grassland specialists like the Bobolink and Eastern Meadowlark, both increasingly hard to find as more marginal land gets converted to row crops. If you have any unmowed grass or a wildflower patch nearby, keep an ear out in early summer.

River Valley Birding

The wooded bluffs along the Mississippi in the eastern part of the state are a completely different world from the open farmland further west — bald eagles nest and winter along the river in real numbers, and the forest cover brings in woodland species that just don’t show up out on the open prairie.