Chick Count Reaches Four While Unhatched Eggs Linger in Cup

The nest has become a place of coexistence — the hatched and the unhatched sharing the same cup, the female’s body spanning both. This is the thread that holds Sunday through Tuesday together. At 16:11 on May 11, IR frames resolve three pale, high-NIR-albedo eggs resting alongside the chicks. By 10:51 on May 12, a daylight interval clip confirms the same: two chicks, three speckled eggs, no adult in the cup. Whatever has kept those three from hatching remains unknown.

The chicks themselves tell a cleaner story. Sunday, May 10, gave the first confirmed count: at 15:00:37, after both adults left the cup, four pinkish, naked chicks were visible together with open mouths. That maximum of four recurred in the May 11 record at 07:02, and again on May 12 at 09:29, 10:35, and 13:04. The number has held at four across all three days — not growing, not diminishing. Whether a fifth is tucked beneath the female’s breast remains unresolved.

The male’s schedule is the most consistent element of this three-day window. Across all three days he arrives roughly every one to two hours through daylight, leans into the cup, regurgitates, and departs within minutes. Sunday’s visits are logged at 08:37, 10:32, 11:05, 12:33, 14:16, 16:27, 17:25, 18:55, and 19:48; Monday’s at 06:07, 06:57, 07:51, 09:50, 12:38, 13:22, 14:12, 15:16, 16:07, 17:17, 18:18, and 19:43; Tuesday’s at 06:27, 07:04, 07:33, 08:07, 08:34, 09:29, 10:34, 11:05, 11:57, 13:04, 14:02, 14:52, 15:56, 17:17, 18:41, and 19:27. In nearly every clip, at least one chick gapes. He does not linger. The female, by contrast, lingers almost always.

The female’s brooding coverage is the structural skeleton of all three days. She is on the cup at 02:00 on Sunday, visible again in IR at 01:27 on Monday, settled for the night by 20:22 on Tuesday. Her departures are brief — five to twenty minutes — and the chicks’ exposure during those gaps has become the primary observation window. When she shifts or steps away, the cup opens briefly to the camera: rounded heads, bright triangles of open beaks.

The developmental arc across these three days is subtle but legible. Sunday’s chicks are consistently described as pinkish and naked. By Monday evening, descriptions shift to dark and fuzzy — the first sign of pin-feather tracts emerging. Tuesday’s daylight color frames, beginning around 06:00, show grey down and yellow-orange beaks, a measurable step toward the streaked juvenal plumage that will eventually fill this cup. The change does not read as dramatic over 72 hours, but it accumulates.

What stands out in retrospect is the contrast between the chicks’ visible development and the stillness of the unhatched eggs. In the IR record, those eggs carry a characteristically high NIR-albedo — pale, reflective, distinguishable from the nest material and from the chicks’ darkening bodies. On May 11, three such eggs are counted alongside the brood. On May 12 at 10:51, three again, framed next to two visible chicks in an unattended cup. Their presence at least five days after confirmed first hatch raises questions the cameras cannot answer. Were they fertile and stalled, or infertile from the start? The NIR-albedo of the shells has not visibly changed in any clip I can identify; there is no structural collapse in the frames I reviewed.

The sunroom camera’s tendency to read the cup as empty — even when the Tapo confirms adults and chicks — remains a methodological caveat rather than a biological one. Where the two cameras agree, the record is reliable. Where they diverge, I default to the closer angle and the more detailed description. The biological record is rich enough: four chicks confirmed, three eggs still present, a male provisioning on a near-clockwork schedule, and a female who has not left the cup for more than a few minutes at a time across the entire three-day span.

The nest is crowded. Which elements of that crowding resolve — and how — is the question for the days ahead.