As bulldozers gobble up natural habitats for wildlife, backyard havens for these animals become increasingly important. And the trees, shrubs, and vines in our backyards can provide, besides shelter, winter food at a time when natural foods are apt to be scarce.

If those foods happen to be brightly colored fruits, not only can they offer sustenance, but they can also decorate the winter landscape with their colors and with the flitting about of feeding birds, squirrels, and other wildlife.

A planting for wildlife does not have to look like a game preserve, because many plants that bear colorful berries are fine landscape plants as well. You might already be growing a crabapple, mountain ash, or Washington hawthorn tree — all of which also provide good food for animals. Washington hawthorn and mountain ash are related to crabapple, with pea-size glossy red or orangish red fruits.

Many people plant crabapples mostly for their spring blossoms, but just imagine how pretty the bare branches can be in winter, each acting like a little shelf for snow and festooned by marble-size scarlet, golden, or orange fruits. Not all varieties of crabapple bear decorative or persistent fruits, though; one of the best for color and for feeding songbirds, pheasants, and grouse through the winter is the Sargent crabapple.

Staghorn sumac, another plant that makes good winter feed for wildlife, grows as a medium-sized tree or as a large shrub. It is invasive, spreading from seed and root suckers, so it’s not a plant for small backyards. Even if you don’t grow it yourself, you — along with pheasants, bobwhite quails, and various other birds — can appreciate it growing along such sites such as old railroad beds and the edges of meadows.

A number of shrubs still decked out in berries are more civilized in their growth than sumac, so are better suited to smaller yards. Most obvious for winter berries is, of course, winterberry, with orange or red berries pressed against black stems. Gray dogwood is another, with white berries. Viburnums are a group of ornamental shrubs that include highbush cranberry, bearing drooping clusters of glossy red berries, and nannyberry and hobblebush, both of whose berries start out bright red and then turn blue-black.

Two vines to provide winter berries for wildlife are bittersweet and Virginia creeper. Although abundant in the wild, bittersweet is worth planting for its bright red and yellow fruits, and Virginia creeper for its crimson fall foliage, rivaled in the wild only by that of poison ivy.