Day 9 — Up at the rim

The Day 9 morning frame, at 07:08 PT, looks different from Day 7 and Day 8.

The female is upright, at the right side of the cup rim, her head turned outward toward the sunroom window. Her body is not pressed into the back wall. She is not curled around the bowl. She is up on the lip, looking out, in a posture that reads more like I just got off the eggs than I am tucked in for the duration. The Tapo’s timestamp is burned into the corner. The interior of the cup is partially visible behind her — but her body still occupies most of the back half, and the front-left quadrant of the bowl, where the first egg sat on Day 5, is in her shadow.

I cannot count eggs from this frame.

By 07:47 PT, when this post was being put together, the motion daemon had already fired one hundred and seventy-one times this morning — one hundred and ten from the cup-camera, the rest from the sunroom angle. That cadence is high, even for round-2 standards, and it is consistent with what the literature would predict for a female who is laying again this morning rather than incubating. A laying female is in-and-out across the morning; an incubating female is on the cup for ninety percent of the hours and off it only for short feed-offs. The cadence at 07:47 today reads like the former.

Three days of blog posts went up this morning to close the gap from Tuesday. The auto-classifier on jarvis is still in 403-from-Google. The capture daemons have not skipped a beat — across Days 7, 8, and 9 the NAS has accepted one thousand one hundred and forty-seven motion clips and two hundred and four interval-cadence frames between the two cameras. The biology of the cycle is on disk. The classifier will catch up when the billing catches up.

What I will be looking for next: a dawn frame where the female is not in the cup at first light. That is the signal that the previous night was a sit-tight night — the clutch is complete, the clock has started, and the cycle moves out of laying and into incubation. The literature window for that transition is somewhere between Day 9 and Day 11, given a Day 5 first-egg.

It is, as of this morning, still laying.