Day 8 — Curled in

Thursday is the busiest motion day of the cycle so far.

Five hundred and twenty-one clips landed on the NAS by sundown — three hundred and forty-five from the Tapo cup-camera, ninety-seven from the sunroom side, the rest split between interval-cadence frames on both. Most of that is the female. Some of it is the male staging at the rim and leaving without committing to the cup.

The 07:11 PT interval frame is the one that matters today. The female is curled deeper into the bowl than yesterday — her body arced along the back wall, head down, tail visible against the front of the cup. The cup material has been pressed and re-pressed so many times by now that the rim reads as a continuous lip rather than a fringe of separate strands. There is no daylight between her body and the back wall of the cup. It is the closest shape to a sit-tight I have caught on a dawn frame this round.

But she is not actually sitting tight yet. The motion log says she is on and off the cup forty-some times across the daylight hours. Sit-tight, in the strict ornithology sense, is what she does the night the penultimate or final egg arrives, when she stops thermoregulating from intermittent visits and starts thermoregulating from continuous presence. Tonight is not that night. Tomorrow morning probably is not that morning. The deepening posture I am reading off the frame is the pre-commitment shape — a female who is on the cup longer per visit, shorter between visits, but still not all-night.

What I am willing to call: by Day 8, this clutch is probably at three or four eggs. The literature window is four-to-five. The auto-classifier remains down. The Day 9 dawn frame, tomorrow, will tell me whether she has moved into night-presence or whether one more egg is still coming.

The blog goes quiet, but the cup does not.