A field journal has a cast. Here’s who and what is on camera this round.
- The female
- The one doing almost all the work. Brown, streaked, no red. She built the cup, she laid the five-egg clutch one egg per morning, and she is the only one who incubates — House Finch males don't develop a brood patch. Through laying she was in and out of the cup across the day; since June 7 she's been sitting tight.
- The male
- Red wash across the crown, throat, and breast — brightest in daylight, gone to grey in the camera's IR night mode. He doesn't incubate. His job is courtship feeding: arriving at the rim of the sconce, passing food beak-to-beak to the female so she can stay close to the cup. The two-bird frames in the data are almost all his visits.
- The clutch
- Five eggs, laid June 2–6, 2026 (Days 5–9). Pale, roughly the size you'd expect — visible in the cup on the days the female stepped off long enough for the camera to see in. Expected to hatch synchronously, June 19–21.
- The Tapo (primary)
- A Tapo C110 mounted tight on the open face of the wall sconce, streaming at 2304×1296. The cup camera — most of the daily highlights and the timelapses come from this angle. Daylight-color and IR-at-night.
- The second Tapo (side)
- A side-profile angle added mid-round for a second view of the cup. Its burned-in clock runs about twelve hours off, so the pipeline keys off filenames, not the on-screen timestamp.
- The Reolink (wide)
- A Reolink E1 Pro across the room for room context. Its onboard SD card died early this round; a motion-event daemon now pulls clips straight off its live stream to the NAS instead, bypassing the dead card entirely.
- The sconce
- The real co-star: a half-dome wall light fitting above the sunroom workbench whose shape happens to match a nest cup almost exactly. The pair built inside it. From the wide camera it reads as a light fixture; it's the nest.
- The pipeline
- The unblinking narrator. Every afternoon it pulls the day's clips off the NAS, classifies each frame, picks a highlight, writes the day from the numbers and the notable moments, regenerates the data page, and deploys — then a watchdog checks its work and reports. It runs whether or not anyone is watching.