Ever since I discovered my first robin’s nest as a young boy – and this one had four beautiful sky-blue colored eggs in it - I’ve become a huge fan of bird’s nests.

Some nests, as you know, are massive, painstakingly built stick by stick, like the bald eagles or ospreys, while others have barely a few twigs and a downy feather or two to hold them together, like the nests of mourning doves or peregrine falcons.

But what fascinates me most is the location of these nests, often cleverly concealed, and the materials birds use to construct them. Many are works of art.

One example is the nest of the tufted titmouse, a small, gray-colored songbird, with rust-colored flanks, who often travels in tandem with chickadees and frequents our backyard bird feeders.

Tufted titmice build a cup-shaped nest in tree cavities, usually chiseled out and abandoned by other birds.

“They line this cup with soft materials such as hair, fur, wool, and cotton, sometimes plucking hairs directly from living mammals,” according to allaboutbirds.org.

And amazingly, naturalists have identified some of these “soft materials” as hair from raccoon, opossum, dog, fox squirrel, red squirrel, rabbit, horse, cow, cat, mouse, woodchuck, and even human hair.

Another favorite nest-builder of mine is the ruby-throated hummingbird. These little miracle workers use sticky strands of spider silk to build their nests.

Here’s George Harrison and Kris Wetherbee in a recent Birds & Blooms magazine article, explaining how they do it:

“Hummingbirds build velvety, compact cups with spongy floors and elastic sides that stretch as the young grow. They weave together twigs, plant fibers, and bits of leaves, and use spider silk as threads to bind their nests together and anchor them to the foundation.”

Chimney swifts, swallow-like birds that quite literally live on the wing, flying from dawn to dusk, devouring vast numbers of flying insects over our towns in the summer, are another species of bird who use a sticky substance, their own saliva, to help them glue a half saucer-like nest of twigs to the inside walls of chimneys or hollow trees.

Another marvel is the Baltimore oriole nest. “It looks like a sock hanging from the end of a branch,” said one ornithologist friend of mine.

During the week-long process, female orioles use their long, slender beaks to weave plant fibers, horsehair, fishing line, cellophane wrappers, and whatever else she and her mate can find to create the amazing sock-like nest.

The female cardinal is another that wows me.

This clever bird “crushes twigs with her beak until they are pliable, then turns in the nest to bend the twigs around her body, pushing them into a cup shape with her feet,” according to allaboutbirds.org.

Finally, this coming spring, I urge you to walk your backyard and watch for robins secretly diving into shrubbery and building nests. The telltale is when they are carrying grass, twigs , or small clumps of mud in their beaks. That’s when you really know they’ve found a spot and are hard at work.

Enjoy!

Bill Hobbs is a contributing writer for the Times and Estuary magazine. He lives in Stonington and can be reached for comments at whobbs246@gmail.com