Notes on nature: Snuggle up, it's nesting season...

Spring has sprung and life’s all aflutter as wildlife gets busy preparing for the breeding season.

You may have spotted birds in your garden flitting to and fro with nest material as they prepare for family life.

Some opt for a traditional-style home, weaving twigs and moss into a neat cup-like shape lined with mud and hair.

They include the robin, which often nests in trees but will take advantage of man-made structures too, as this fantastic picture of a female nesting in the dashboard of a 1978 ex-Army Land Rover shows.

Vehicle owner Dan Skinner, an RSPB UX designer based at The Lodge, said: “It has a canvas top which I leave open sometimes. There's been a cat living in there for a while, but as I got in a few weeks ago a robin fluttered out.

“I didn't think anything of it, but as I drove down the road I realised there was a bird’s nest with five eggs. I went into town very carefully and then came home and checked later that the robin had returned, and it had. ”

Dan, of Whepstead, Suffolk, has decided to leave the vehicle alone for around four weeks to allow the adult robins to incubate the eggs and the chicks to fledge.  

He added: “It’s quite sweet to see them nesting but I do want my Landy back - I used to use it all the time!”

Robins will often make good use of artificial holes in a variety of man-made objects, generally using dead leaves as a nest base, on which a cup of moss, grass and leaves is built and lined with finer material including hair, vegetable fibre and feathers.

And they're certainly not alone in doing so, as this photo montage of a safety-conscious blue tit leaving its nest inside a life ring shows.

Like the robin, a blue tit’s incubation period lasts for a couple of weeks, but the female blue tit will lay as many as eight-to-ten eggs, while robins generally only incubate four or five.

Smaller birds such as tits and robins tend to lay larger numbers of eggs as life further down the avian food chain can be short, and it would be folly to put too much faith into a small number of young.

So, next time you get into your car beware, you may just have more passengers than you'd bargained for!