The creatures your plants feed
Every plant here is somebody’s food, home, or nursery.
Last updated August 2026
A native plant isn’t decoration — it’s the bottom of a food web. Indigene names the butterflies, moths, bees, birds and small mammals each plant supports, and gives many of them a page and a photograph. Some are picky: a caterpillar that eats only one kind of leaf is a “host” relationship, and losing that plant means losing that creature.
How you use it
- Open Wildlife to meet the animals the app knows.
- On any plant’s page, see which creatures it feeds.
- On an animal’s page, see the plants that keep it going — and add one to your spot.
A “keystone” plant is one that feeds far more creatures than its neighbours — plant one and you’ve done the work of ten.
Learn more
- What pollinators are and why they matter — U.S. Forest Service
- Identify and record the creatures you see — iNaturalist
- Bees, butterflies and other invertebrates, in depth — The Xerces Society
How this grew
Every change to this part of the app, newest first — the same plain notes that go out with each update.
Version 0.28
August 30, 2026- A share card for every animal. Post a link to a butterfly, bee or bird and the preview now shows that creature, the regions it's native to, and how many native plants feed or shelter it — not one generic picture for all of them. Browse wildlife
- Animals are drawn, not borrowed. Each creature now wears a hand-drawn silhouette in Indigene's green — a butterfly with its wings up, a bee, a bird, a tortoise — across the wildlife lists and pages and on the share card, replacing the phone's flat, wings-pinned emoji.
Version 0.27
August 28, 2026- And four creatures to meet. New on the wildlife pages: the echo azure, the ghostly Clodius parnassian (its caterpillars eat only bleeding heart), the band-tailed pigeon that lives on elderberry and cascara, and the native bees that specialize on checkermallow. Meet them
- And the creatures those plants feed. The region and its plants now name the butterflies, moths, bees, birds and mammals they support — 23 kinds, including the endangered Karner blue, whose caterpillars eat only wild lupine. Meet them
- The ranked list shows the plants. The plants matched to your spot — and the plants on an animal's page — now carry a photograph beside the name instead of a drawing of a generic shrub, like every other list in the app.
- A picture for nearly every plant and animal. The 109 plants and 70 animals nobody had chosen a photo for now show the one iNaturalist's own species page opens with, credited to the photographer. Wildlife is a page of real butterflies instead of identical emoji.
- An animal's plants are counted where the list starts. "Plants for it — 18" used to be a tile a screen above them. The count is now the list's own heading, with each region's under it. Wildlife
- Shorter cards in that list. Each carried a sentence about the tie, so five plants filled two screens. A card now gives the name, what the plant offers, and the source across its full width; the sentence is a tap away, on the chip.
- A way to search a long list. An animal with more than a screenful of plants gets the same type-to-narrow box the region lists have — try it on the sunflower-family specialist bees.
- The tallies show up where they tell you something. "Raises young on: 1" over a list of two plants was counting to two for you. Those boxes now wait for the long lists, like the monarch's.
- The other places to look are one row you can swipe. A monarch is found in four regions, and each was a full-width button down the card. They're chips on a single line now, and each still runs the lookup there.
- A row with no photograph looked like a broken one. Some entries in the wildlife list — "Mason & mining bees" — are a group rather than one species, so there's nothing to photograph them as. Their names now line up with everyone else's. Wildlife
Version 0.26
August 9, 2026- Four of the new creatures now open with a sentence instead of a fragment or a paragraph. Lorquin's admiral led a card with 42 words; the spicebush swallowtail led with five. Same stories, said properly, in French too. Browse by wildlife.
Version 0.25
August 8, 2026- A hundred and thirty-six more animals named on the plants you can grow. Nine regions searched against an open database of published plant-and-animal records. Pairings went from 415 to 551; plants naming nothing at all fell from 78 to 19. Browse them at Wildlife.
- Nine new creatures. The red admiral, silver-spotted skipper, spicebush swallowtail, Lorquin's admiral, anise swallowtail, eastern carpenter bee, bushtit, lesser goldfinch, and the brown-headed nuthatch — which uses a flake of bark as a tool to pry up more bark.
- The wildlife list is a list again. Browse by wildlife printed each creature's whole description, so a screenful of cards was a wall of text. A card now opens with a sentence or two; the animal's own page still has the rest.
- Every animal reads shorter, in French too. All 73 descriptions were rewritten to say the same thing and stop — the longest ran to 101 words — and the French was rewritten to match, so neither edition is the long one.
- An animal's page counts its plants in tiles. The monarch shows how many of our natives feed it, how many raise its young, and how many it has no substitute for — the same tiles a plant's page has. Tap one for what it means.
- An animal's page no longer calls it "a native animal". Every animal in Wildlife is native, and the page names the regions right beside it. What's left is the part that isn't repeated: where it's native in the wild, and who says so.
- The honesty note at the foot of the wildlife pages is a footnote now — two sentences in small type with the sources link on the end, instead of a paragraph in the middle of the page. What it dropped moved into the 📍 pills.
Version 0.24
August 7, 2026- Animals can have real photographs too. The butterflies, bees, birds and mammals in Wildlife were drawn as an emoji, which tells you it's a butterfly and nothing about which one. They now use real, credited photographs.
- The French edition is finished. Choosing French used to translate the buttons and then hand you English paragraphs. Every one of them is now in French: all 229 plants, the 65 animals and the 27 look-alikes.
- Three groups of animals had French names that never appeared. "Osmies et andrènes", "Abeilles spécialistes des astéracées" and "Colibri d'Anna et colibri roux" were written down, but filed in a way that showed a French reader the scientific name instead.
Version 0.22
August 4, 2026- And in the Northwest too. Douglas-fir, western hemlock and western redcedar now name the crossbills and siskins that live off their cones. Twenty-two new animals joined the wildlife pages in all.
Version 0.21
August 3, 2026- Swipe through the photos. When a photo of something someone spotted near you opens large, you can slide it aside with your thumb to see the next one, instead of aiming for the small ‹ › buttons at the edges.
Version 0.18
July 31, 2026- An animal's page got the same treatment. On an animal, the plants that keep it going are laid out several across instead of one long stack. It's about a third shorter on a laptop.
Version 0.17
July 31, 2026- The preview now describes the page you actually sent. Every Indigene link used to show the same card. Share butterfly weed and the card now says what it does for monarchs; share the monarch and you get that page's own words. 261 pages in all.
Version 0.15
July 30, 2026- Browse by wildlife now has a "Filter by name…" box, the same one the plant lists have. Type "swallow" and the page keeps only the swallowtails.
- Each group of creatures also has its own page now — just the butterflies, just the moths, the bees, birds or mammals. A row of buttons hops between them.
- Pick a region on the wildlife page and see only the creatures that live there. Choose the Pacific Northwest and the list narrows to the 15 creatures its natives support. Every combination has its own address, like the butterflies of the French Alps.
- Every creature now says where it lives, instead of wearing a "native" badge. Every animal on these pages is native, so the tag told you nothing. A creature found in more than one region now shows a pin and a number — 📍 3 for the monarch.
Version 0.13
July 29, 2026- Twenty new creatures on the wildlife pages, most of them European, so browsing by animal works for France too. Look up the large blue, whose caterpillar gets carried into an ants' nest and spends ten months eating the ants' own young.
- The French caterpillar counts are now counted, not estimated. An open dataset of 5,152 European butterflies and moths replaced our honest guesses. Blackthorn feeds 318 kinds of caterpillar, not the 100 we'd estimated; holly feeds 7, not 12. Some French lists are now in a fairer order.
Version 0.12
July 28, 2026- See the wildlife near you. Every creature in the wildlife browser now has a "See it near you" section: share your location or type a ZIP code, and Indigene pulls real, credited photos of that animal spotted near there, live from iNaturalist.
Version 0.11
July 28, 2026- Release notes now link to the things they describe — like the wildlife browser — so you can go straight from reading about a feature to trying it.
Version 0.7
July 21, 2026- Browse by wildlife: start from a butterfly, moth, bee, bird, or mammal and see which native plants support it — because "which plants bring monarchs?" is often the real question.
- Every plant–animal tie says how the plant helps (caterpillar food, nectar, berries, seeds, or shelter) and how much the animal depends on it — from "this is its only host plant" to "one of many it can use".
- Every wildlife relationship names its source, with links straight to the species record where the source has one.
- Plant pages show the wildlife each plant brings in, with links both ways.
- Relationship tags are one short word each; tap one to read the full meaning.
- Wildlife pages got the same comfortable margins as the rest of the app.