Close your eyes and picture a bird’s nest.

Did you imagine a cup built of twigs or grasses, perched on the branch of a tree? When it comes to bird nests, trees get all the attention, but nests come in all shapes, sizes and locations.

Bobolinks nest on the ground in meadows and hayfields, their young protected from view (but not from mowers) by summer-green grass grown tall. Ovenbirds weave dead leaves into domed nests hidden in plain sight on the forest floor. Loons nest on lakeshores, peregrines perch on cliffs, and belted kingfishers burrow into earthen banks.

Woodpeckers, mergansers, bluebirds, tree swallows and saw-whet owls all nest in hollowed-out tree cavities.

And then there are the birds who nest with us.

Every spring, my husband and I eagerly await the return of “our” phoebes. The birds, of course, belong to no one but themselves, but they’ve nested on our house for so long that they feel a bit like family. For years, they raised their young atop the motion sensor tucked under the soffit on our garage, but they’ve since moved to one of the beams below our deck – a welcome change, as it means I can spy on them from above through a gap in the decking.

Sometimes, if the nest isn’t ransacked by raccoons or commandeered by overwintering mice, the phoebes will return to it the following spring, spruce it up with fresh moss, mud and a new inner cup – woven out of pine needles, dried grass and, often, strands of my hair -- and call it home for another season. As I write, the female is dutifully incubating her second clutch of the summer in last year’s nest, her first brood having fledged in mid-June.

Although most other aerial insectivores have experienced steep population declines, Eastern phoebes have bucked the trend, in large part by adapting so successfully to nesting on human-made structures. In addition to garages and decks, look for them in woodsheds, on trail kiosks, under bridges and dams and inside culverts. One year, a pair of phoebes even took up residence in a friend’s overturned canoe, delaying the start of his summer paddling by more than a month.

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Robins are less predictable, but not-infrequent housemates. Several years ago, they built a nest in the crook of a downspout just feet from our bedroom window, but were surprisingly stealthy about it; they were sitting on eggs before we’d even noticed they were there.

One summer, apparently overwhelmed by the abundance of enticing-but-identical nooks beneath our deck, they built full or partial nests in every partition, leaving streamers of dried grass trailing beneath each one. In the end, exhausted perhaps from the exertion or bewildered by the choice before them, they laid just one egg in one of the nests and never returned to incubate it.

This year, the robins under my colleague Nate’s deck fared better, fledging three chicks from one nest in May and another three in mid-July from a second nest they built on a different section of deck.

Of course, no discussion of backyard nests would be complete without a mention of the Carolina wren. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes these plucky songbirds as “versatile” nesters; nest locations have included mailboxes, flowerpots, coat pockets, old boots, tin cans, spare tires and the glove compartments of abandoned cars.

This once-strictly Southern species has expanded its range into New Hampshire over the past few decades – a result of warming winters brought on by climate change. To my knowledge, they’ve never nested in our yard, but they have certainly made a home for themselves here in the Monadnock region. If you find a bird nest in an old hubcap or under the lid of your household propane tank, there’s a good chance it belongs to a Carolina wren.

It’s exciting to find any nesting birds, but there’s something particularly special about these neighborhood nests. Observing the everyday miracle of eggs becoming nestlings becoming fledglings – and sometimes the everyday heartbreak of losing nests to predators or storms – ties us more closely to the world around us. The daily rhythms of wild birds living their wild lives become part of our own daily rhythms, reminding us that we too belong to the natural world. I look forward to it every summer.

If you’d like to learn more about nesting birds, including nest box designs and tips for identifying the nests and eggs of common backyard bird species, visit the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s NestWatch project at nestwatch.org.

Brett Amy Thelen is science director at the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock.