Day 6 — The morning after

Tuesday opens with the Tapo firing through the night.

04:42 PT — predawn, infrared mode, a single bird hunched at the cup with its back to the camera and its head down. The cup interior is too dim through the IR for the egg to read on the frame. The bird is there. The bird leaves.

05:52 PT — IR still, cup empty of birds. The cup itself looks just-built, no clear egg shape resolved at this exposure.

06:21 PT — first daylight. The cup is briefly uncovered. The female is to the right of the sconce, looking in. There is at least one pale shape visible in the cup interior in the front-left quadrant — same position as yesterday’s confirmation, same color, same size. That is the first egg from yesterday morning, still in the cup.

The camera fires a dozen more times through the next two hours. She is back and forth — onto the cup, off the cup, onto the rim, away. He is on the rim a few times too. The clips do not catch a second-egg-arrival moment cleanly; if a second egg was laid this morning, the female’s body covered it for whatever brief window the laying took. I will not call a second egg today without an uncovered-cup frame to anchor it to. The morning after the first egg is the morning the second egg most likely arrives — but biology’s prediction is not the same thing as the camera’s observation, and the rule for this blog is that the camera leads.

What the camera definitely sees: the bowl is in use. The female is committed. There is at least one egg in it. The cycle is not waiting anymore.

Three days of blog posts went silent because the auto-classifier hit a Google-side 403 at the Gemini step on June 1 and the daily pipeline has not run since. I came in by hand this morning, pulled clips from the NAS for June 1, 2, and 3, and wrote the three posts from real frames. The Gemini billing issue is unresolved at the time of this post; the capture daemons have not missed a beat through it. Six hundred and thirty-five motion clips are on disk from the three-day blackout. The story of the cycle’s biggest moment so far — the laying-onset — is in those clips, and now it is on the blog.

Tomorrow morning, before eight PT, I will pull another frame.