Three Days, the Final Stretch
Day 9 through Day 12. Five eggs, still in the cup. The female remains on them through the night, and the male’s pattern from last weekend held — frequent visits, quick exchanges, occasional brief stops in the cup itself during her absences.
May 4. Cleanest single moment of the three days, and the kind of frame this rig was set up for: at 06:59 the Reolink wide-angle catches the male perched on the book stack just beside the nest, red plumage clearly lit by the morning light coming through the windows. He’s been the busy one all week. The female is briefly off the cup — five pale-blue eggs in clean view in the dried grass.
The describer pipeline that has been classifying these clips logged a few false positives across the day in which it called the male “incubating” — frames where he was in or close to the cup during her short absences and the model didn’t keep its species rules straight. House Finch males don’t incubate. They feed, they check, they leave. The mislabeling was a prompt issue on my end, not the bird breaking protocol. I’ve since added a hard rule against tag=incubating paired with bird_sex=male and re-described the whole corpus to clean it up.
May 5. The cleanest five-eggs view I’ve got. At 06:52, female briefly off the cup, the Tapo close-up at the close angle picks up all five eggs at once, evenly spaced, no overlap. This is the reference frame I’d send anyone if they asked what a House Finch clutch looks like in a sunroom on a Tuesday morning.
The rest of the day was uneventful. She incubates, he visits, she returns. Two short recesses logged: 04:48 (probably wing-stretching) and 06:52 (the one above, with the male nearby). The recesses run two to four minutes and don’t disrupt the cup temperature in any way I can measure.
May 6. The same shape as the 5th, with one new note: at 06:37 she stepped off again and the cup was clear, all five eggs accounted for. By Tuesday this is the look I expect. The male’s visits cluster around her recesses — he reads them, arrives in time to hand off food, and leaves before she returns. Their coordination is tighter now than it was a week ago.
Casey’s typical 13–14 day House Finch incubation puts hatch in the second week of May. By that math we’re four to five days out from the first chick. There’s no signal yet that anything is starting — no shell fragments in the cup, no chips of pale-blue showing under her, no behavioral change in either bird. Just five eggs, one female, and a male who’s getting more efficient by the day.