Motherhood is serious business for songbirds.

Mother songbirds work hard, if only from spring through summer.

Still, female songbirds take on the task of motherhood every year of their lives and instinctively raise their babies through long hours of nest building, brooding eggs and nourishing their chicks into fledglings.

It’s not a job for the fainthearted. But female birds make stalwart mothers. After all, theirs is the job of nest making.

For example, a female northern cardinal collects nesting material of twigs, leaves, grasses and sundry fibers. The bird chews on twigs with her beak to make them pliable. Her feet then shove the bendable twigs into an open cup shape wedged against a fork of limbs in a bush or tree. Finally, the bird carpets the nest interior with leaves and grasses.

The male’s help comes in the form of food, diligently delivered to the female laboring with construction.

Not all female songbirds do all the work. Male and female Carolina wrens share the labor of building a cup-shaped nest with a dome on top. Male and female downy woodpeckers chisel out a nest cavity in a dead limb.

Egg laying is obviously the female’s job, as is brooding the eggs. Prior to laying eggs, the female undergoes hormonal changes that create a bare patch of skin called a “brood patch” on her breast or belly.

Warm blood in vessels of the brood patch transfer heat to developing embryos and maintain a constant temperature in the egg’s fluid reservoir.

A mother bird communicates to chicks inside the shell, “telling” them when it’s time to hatch

based on food supply.

Most male songbirds help feed chicks and take an active role in feeding fledglings.

But the female ruby-throated hummingbird gets zero help from the male, who only comes around to breed.

The female hummingbird gathers leaves, plant fibers, spider webs and bark to weave a cup-shaped nest no bigger than a golf ball and camouflages it with a layer of lichen and moss.

The bird bevels the rim of the tiny cup inward to keep eggs from rolling out and creates enough elasticity in the nest to make room for growing chicks. She secludes the nest within a leafy twig so that neither predators nor people will find it.

Photos by Kathy Adams Clark / Contributor Both female, left, and male eastern bluebirds take active roles in caring for offspring.

Mother songbirds, like this northern cardinal with a beak full of food, are working hard to feed their nestlings.

A female black-crested titmouse gathers food for her chicks.