What a House Finch nesting cycle actually looks like, in data — as it unfolds. This page covers Day 1 (2026-05-29) → Day 10 (2026-06-07), from a pair returning to the wall sconce through incubation. Every chart below regenerates from the same daily-metrics JSON the journal entries are built from.
10 days observed · 2,655 motion clips · 48 two-bird frames · current phase: Incubation.
Phase timeline
Each bar is one day, sized by motion-clip volume and colored by the biological phase the nest is in. As the cycle moves from building → laying → incubation → hatching → brooding → fledging, the colors shift; the heights tell you how busy the cup was on each day.
Motion volume
How many motion clips the Tapo captured each day, split by what the classifier saw. Bird-in-frame stacks above no-bird. Early days (before the classifier came online or while the GCP project was in billing dunning) show motion only.
Courtship-feeding pulse
House Finch males don’t incubate — they provision the female at the rim of the cup with food. This line counts the frames each day where both adults appear together: the male’s arrival, the food transfer, his departure. The curve should climb across the laying and incubation phases, peak around hatching, and shift as the male transitions from feeding the female to feeding the chicks.
Quiet cup
Frames where the camera fired but no bird was in view — the cup as the camera sees it without an adult on it. During building these are short windows between material-carrying trips. During laying they get rarer as the female commits more. During incubation they collapse to nothing. The script also uses these frames to build the daily no-bird timelapse that ships with each daily post.
Weather
What the camera was filming through. Lafayette, California — daily high and low temperature with the diurnal swing shaded between, max wind on the right axis, precipitation marked as bars when it falls. Useful when reading the visit-frequency charts back: hot afternoons drop activity, rain compresses it into the dry windows.
Phase details
Where the cycle has been, where it is, where it’s going. The status column updates from data/stages.toml — the moment Casey edits that file (or the classifier flips a stage), the page re-renders.
| Phase | Status | Start | End | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nest-building | complete | 2026-05-29 | 2026-06-01 | Female pressing material into the rim of the wall sconce. Male tracking, courtship-feeding at the cup. Cup read as finished on Day 4 (2026-06-01). |
| Laying | complete | 2026-06-02 | 2026-06-07 | First egg confirmed in cup at 09:06 PT 2026-06-02 (Day 5). Clutch built to five eggs, roughly one per morning — the front-half, per-egg sequence round 1 was never there to film. Female settled to tight incubation on Day 10 (2026-06-07), closing the laying window. |
| Incubation | active (now) | 2026-06-07 | — | Female-only, begun Day 10 (2026-06-07) on a complete five-egg clutch. Delayed onset → synchronous hatch expected ~12–14 days out (≈June 19–21). The NIR developmental series starts here; the early-laid eggs carry a genuine pre-development baseline round 1 never had. |
| Hatching | pending | — | — | ~1–2 day synchronous span. Female removes eggshell fragments. |
| Brooding → Provisioning | pending | — | — | Female broods continuously first ~3 days; crossover to active provisioning by ~day 7–9 as chicks thermoregulate. |
| Fledging | pending | — | — | 11–19 days post-hatch (mode 12–15). First daylight with empty cup = fledge. |
Raw data
Each chart on this page is built from a small JSON file per day. The journal entries are built from the same files. They’re plain JSON; the camera saw what it saw.
- Day 1 (May 29):
2026-05-29.json - Day 2 (May 30):
2026-05-30.json - Day 3 (May 31):
2026-05-31.json - Day 4 (Jun 1):
2026-06-01.json - Day 5 (Jun 2):
2026-06-02.json - Day 6 (Jun 3):
2026-06-03.json - Day 7 (Jun 4):
2026-06-04.json - Day 8 (Jun 5):
2026-06-05.json - Day 9 (Jun 6):
2026-06-06.json - Day 10 (Jun 7):
2026-06-07.json