Three Days of Hatch: One Egg Lingers in the Cup

The middle days of May produced the most consequential footage this nest camera has yet recorded — not a single decisive moment but a protracted negotiation between the old state of the nest and the new one. Eggs and chicks occupied the same cup simultaneously for three full days, and the camera documented the overlap with a thoroughness that no spot-check visit could have matched.

Thursday, May 7

The overnight clips are among the quietest of the entire incubation run. The female sits very low in the cup, barely visible above the nest rim in monochrome IR, shifting weight only occasionally through the pre-dawn hours. Then, at approximately 06:13, a motion trigger fires and the frame tells a different story.

The female shifts her body and the cup beneath her briefly resolves — a pale oval of high NIR-albedo, unmistakably an egg, alongside at least two smaller, darker shapes consistent with newly hatched chicks. Hatch is underway, and it is not simultaneous. Across at least six distinct clips through the morning hours, the cup holds both forms at once: pale ovals with their characteristic high NIR-albedo among the rounded, downy masses of hatchlings. The male arrives repeatedly at the rim through the morning. His contacts with the female are brief, beak-to-beak, the beginning of a behavioral shift that will play out across the next forty-eight hours — from the mutual courtship feeding pattern of incubation to something increasingly directional, food moving outward from him toward the cup.

Friday, May 8

The second consecutive night of uninterrupted female brooding ends the same way the first did: first light in monochrome IR, the female’s silhouette low and steady. The morning’s first significant view comes at 07:48 — two chicks, clearly defined, visible in the unattended cup.

Yet the pale oval remains. At 11:14 and 11:20, brief unattended intervals reveal a single shape — high NIR-albedo, oval — resting alongside at least one chick. The same pairing recurs at 12:44, 14:14, and 17:29. Five distinct clips across the day document the egg’s persistence. By late afternoon, three chicks are visible together during female absences. The male’s provisioning visits now carry different energy from his earlier rim approaches — he is arriving at the cup itself, bill angled downward, chick gaping confirmed at 10:21, 10:24, 11:36, and 13:51. A human with a phone appears at the nest around 17:50; the female clears briefly, and three open mouths are visible upward in the frame. She returns within the minute and settles for the night before 20:00.

Saturday, May 9

Overnight brooding holds through a third night without interruption. The morning brings the sharpest count yet: a sunroom-camera clip at 10:21 captures four chicks clearly, the highest confirmed number in a single frame across the entire three-day record.

The pale oval remains. Clips at 12:15, 15:33, and 17:53 each record a shape consistent with an unhatched egg — its NIR-albedo distinct against the now-darker, feathered mass of chicks surrounding it. Whether this is the same individual egg present since Thursday, or simply the last of the clutch to outlast its nest-mates, the record cannot say. The male’s provisioning reached its greatest intensity on this day: at least fifteen confirmed feeding visits logged between 06:27 and 19:51, intervals varying from roughly forty to ninety minutes, both adults occasionally present at the rim simultaneously.

Across the three days

What these seventy-two hours reveal, taken together, is the female’s extraordinary constancy. Each night she was settled into the cup before darkness fell; each dawn she was still there. The male’s role evolved continuously but without interruption — brief bilateral rim contacts on Thursday becoming, by Saturday, the rhythm of a provisioner making fifteen round trips in a single day. Threading through all three days, unchanged in its bright NIR-albedo, unchanged in its oval form, is the signal of that last egg — present while chick counts rose around it, present while the cup’s nature transformed from incubation station to brooding chamber to feeding platform. Four chicks confirmed. One question still open inside the nest.