Urban environments are heavily anthropogenic and often species depauperate. Many bird species, however, persist in cities, facilitated in part by the vegetated habitats cities provide. Urban vegetation management is likely to be key to bird conservation in cities, but supporting such conservation requires a more complete understanding of the relationships between urban birds and different aspects of urban vegetation than we currently possess. We sought to identify relationships between the species richness and abundance of songbird nesting guilds and attributes of urban vegetation to help build this understanding. We used guild richness and abundance and urban vegetation data compiled via point-count and urban-forest surveys in the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City corridor of Iowa, USA to construct binomial N-mixture models. We used our models to evaluate relationships between the abundance and richness of native songbird nesting guilds and different attributes of urban forests and understory vegetation. Relationships between nesting guilds and urban vegetation differed among guilds, although relationships with some attributes of urban vegetation (e.g., impervious and lawn cover) were more similar. Our models indicate that some characteristics of urban vegetation (e.g., tree height, evergreen trees, standing dead trees) are related to the richness or abundance of only one guild, while others (e.g., low vegetation) are important predictors for multiple guilds, but with different relationships. These findings suggest that some attributes such as lawn and impervious cover could be managed city-wide to support conservation, but few vegetation management approaches could be applied uniformly across cities to support species in all nesting guilds. These results thus indicate that urban conservation in the study area and beyond is likely to require vegetation management that is targeted to specific settings within cities and to the requirements of different groups of species that occur within those settings to support a diversity of bird species.