Terms that appear repeatedly in the daily logs, prose dispatches, and data files — pulled together here so each post doesn’t have to re-explain them.
- Brood patch
- A bare, vascular patch of skin on the female's belly that she presses against the eggs (and later, chicks) for heat transfer. The reason the female does all the incubation in this species: only she develops one.
- Brooding
- Sitting on chicks to keep them warm, distinct from incubating (sitting on eggs). The crossover from near-continuous brooding to active provisioning typically lands around days 7–9 after hatch, as the chicks start regulating their own temperature.
- Clip
- One video file from one camera. Either motion-triggered (fired by the camera's own motion detection) or interval (a few seconds, taken on a fixed schedule regardless of motion). Each clip is independently classified.
- Clutch
- The full set of eggs a female lays for one nesting attempt. This round: five eggs, laid one per morning, June 2–6, 2026.
- Courtship feeding
- Male House Finches don't incubate, but they bring food to the female while she's on the cup. Visible as a clip with the male arriving at the rim, the female lifting her head to receive, a beak-to-beak transfer, then the male leaving. Counted as its own metric in the daily logs.
- Cup
- The actual nest — a grass-and-fiber bowl the female presses into shape. This round it's built inside a half-dome wall sconce above the workbench, a fitting whose shape happens to match a nest cup almost exactly.
- Daily log
- The automated post built every afternoon from that day's clips: motion counts, a narrative written from the day's stats and notable moments, the highlight image, and the no-bird timelapse. Distinct from a dispatch.
- Delayed incubation onset
- House Finch females don't sit tight on the clutch from the first egg — they wait until the penultimate or final egg, then commit. Because every embryo's clock starts at the same moment, a clutch laid across five mornings still hatches across a tight one-to-two-day window. This is the mechanism behind synchronous hatching.
- Dispatch
- A prose post, distinct from a daily log — written by hand (or with permission to be long) on days that earn narrative attention: the first egg, incubation onset, hatch, fledge.
- Highlight of the day
- The single best frame the pipeline pulled from the day's clips, with a one-sentence caption. Selected for sharpness and for showing both adults or the cup contents when possible.
- Incubation
- The female sitting tight on the complete clutch, near-continuously day and night, for roughly 12–14 days. Began this round on June 7, 2026 (Day 10). Synchronous hatch expected June 19–21.
- Interval clip
- A clip taken on a fixed schedule regardless of motion. Round 1's lesson: motion clips catch events, interval clips catch presence — the long quiet stretches that tell you the female is on the cup at 14:23 even when nothing moved.
- IR / infrared mode
- The camera's night mode. Color washes out, so the male's red head — the species' best diagnostic feature — disappears after dark. A low-contrast tucked shape on the cup at night is the female sitting, not an empty cup.
- Motion clip
- A clip fired by the camera's onboard motion detection. The bulk of each day's captures. High counts mean a busy cup; the count alone doesn't distinguish the female shifting from the male visiting.
- Sconce
- The half-dome wall light fitting the pair chose to nest in this round, above the sunroom workbench. The Tapo camera is tight on its open face; the cup sits inside it.
- Sit-tight
- The behavioral shift from in-and-out cup visits (laying) to near-continuous presence (incubation). The first dawn frame with the female not in the cup, after a night of presence, is the signal the clutch is complete and the clock has started.
- Synchronous hatch
- All eggs hatching within a tight window despite being laid on different mornings — the payoff of delayed incubation onset.