Photo: Intelligencer
One day in late May, I spotted some weedy crud on my porch sconce. It looked like Dorothy’s Scarecrow had died right here in Westchester.
This particular light fixture is about seven feet off the ground. To see what the mess was, I held my phone high overhead and took a picture. It was, of course, a bird’s nest, containing four tiny light-blue eggs. Adorable.
At some point, those eggs would hatch. How cool that I’d discovered them now! I could witness the miracle of life right on our doorstep. I could set up a streaming camera!
That idea might have been my first mistake.
Or maybe it was resolving to post the videos on Facebook, getting thousands of people invested in the fate of those goddamned eggs.
This much is for sure: When all of this started, I had no idea how much I didn’t know about birds. I didn’t know how seriously the internet takes nature. And I definitely didn’t know how many trips through the emotional wringer lay ahead.
Day 1
I’m researching nature cams. I find a cheap, motion-activated, weatherproof, night-vision Wi-Fi security camera that seems perfect for my project. It’s called the Wyze Cam v4 — a white cube, maybe two inches on a side, 35 bucks.
The next morning, Amazon drops it off on the front porch — fittingly, right beneath the nest.
I duct-tape the camera onto the wall and angle it down toward the nest. How will this not be the greatest summer experiment ever?
Photo: David Pogue
I head inside, wait ten minutes, and check the app. There is a small brown bird on the nest right now! It’s the mama! The focus is blurry, and the app puts an annoying yellow rectangle around the subject, but overall, I’m exhilarated. This must be how David Attenborough feels.
My wife, Nicki, knows a decent amount about birds. She says this one is a house finch.
The camera is only seven inches from the eggs. It’s so intimate it almost feels like a violation. You can see every little wiggle the mama makes, hear every peep.
I’m so proud of myself that I make a Facebook post about it.
This first post is mostly about the camera — the bird is almost an afterthought — which seems goofy in retrospect.
But wow: 407 likes and 84 comments on the first day. They’re fun to read:
— That is kewl. Glad the setup didn’t scare her away somehow.
— Precious!
— How about calling momma Amelia Earhart, since they will be taking flight someday?!
Now, I generally post on Facebook a couple of times a week, and people usually leave a few comments. This, however, strikes me as an unusual wave of interest for something so nerdy. Clearly, the people like the finch cam.
But if all these people are going to follow the great cycle of life, I’ve got to fix the focus. The Wyze is intended to observe intruders approaching your front porch — six, ten feet away — not subjects a few inches in front of it.
When I can’t focus up close, I just put on a pair of CVS reading glasses. I wonder if …
I break apart an old pair of readers and tape one of its lenses over the camera.
Photo: David Pogue
And I’ll be darned — it works! The mama bird is now crystal clear. The commenters rejoice:
— Oh my God you Hubbled it!
Day 3
Any time Amelia prepares to sit on the eggs, she first stands on the sconce, cocks her head, and appears to count them.
Then she hops onto them and does six seconds of adorable wiggling. She’s obviously snuggling in for the night.
— I like the wiggle when she settles in.
— Presumably to make sure she has them all covered!
Nicki, however, finds a bird site that provides a more functional explanation of the wiggle:
Birds that are incubating eggs have a brood patch on their chest: an area lacking feathers that has increased blood flow to the tissue (it is highly vascularized). This patch of skin is wrinkly and loose, and allows the bird to transfer heat very efficiently to the eggs. As the bird sits down on the eggs to incubate, it wiggles its body to ensure the brood patch makes good contact with the eggs.Even better!
After four Facebook updates, I apologize for posting so often about the finches, but I shouldn’t have worried.
— Never too much finchcam!
— Keep posting. Don’t leave us in suspense.
— This makes me so damn happy. Please let us follow the whole journey!
Day 6
I check the camera when I wake: The first egg has hatched! The light-blue shell lies in jagged halves.
The baby is nothing more than a puff of fluff, but it’s an incredible sight. It’s a new family: three eggs, a hatchling, and Amelia.
Photo: David Pogue
But then, an hour later — oh crap. Both mother and baby are GONE!
Photo: David Pogue
Did a predator attack? Infuriatingly, I’ll never know. I missed the critical moment of the disappearance because I’ve been using the Wyze only for live viewing. For motion-triggered auto-recording, you need a subscription. And like an idiot, I haven’t signed up for one yet. (I quickly remedy that problem.)
The finch fans offer their theories about the disappearance:
— Could be the work of (invasive) house wrens. They’re horrible little birds with a pretty song.
— Could be a snake.
— Beware of squirrels … they love to eat eggs and baby birds.
Then a new tenor enters the comments section, one I hadn’t expected: the “nature is brutal” philosophy. These commenters are the realists who are eager to puncture any sentimentality they may see in the way I or other commenters are reacting to what we’re seeing.
— The problem with these kind of group-witnessing processes for nesting birds, having done this a number of times, is that very often, the saga of the cute babies does not end well — they are somebody else’s tasty meal.
— If each pair of house finches successfully fledged 4 chicks times 3 broods every summer, the world would pretty soon be full of house finches. Their job is actually to raise exactly 2 to adulthood.
Everyone’s falling in love with Amelia and her little family. Have I created a heartwarming reality show in which the main characters all get murdered on-camera?
— Did you move the hatchling from the ground? Wait, what?
I hadn’t even thought to look on the ground. And sure enough: The dead hatchling is lying directly underneath the nest.
Squirrels, wrens, and snakes had nothing to do with its murder.
— So, if the baby bird that hatched had died, they would instinctively throw it out of the nest. If they leave it, they know it will attract predators.
Huh. It’s a reasonable theory.
I go back inside to contemplate taking down the whole camera–reading-glasses apparatus. At that moment, I get a notification: “Motion detected.”
I check the app. Amelia is BACK! Wiggling, rotating the remaining three eggs. She was gone for 45 minutes. What’s going on?
This thing is going full soap opera.
— This is weirdly gripping.
— Oh geez. I’m getting invested.
— This is the best 24-hr TV on right now!
— This is strangely satisfying to wake up to every day in Singapore. How can this not be a streaming series?
— It’s fun and interesting to watch, but oy! The stress!!
Day 7
In the real world, Israel is pushing into Rafah, Ukraine’s air defenses are weakening, and Trump’s trial is in closing arguments.
But on the sconce, there’s only joy: The second egg hatches, and the camera catches all of it. The egg cracks open. The baby flops around. Amelia offers a first feeding and then starts eating the shell (for calcium, apparently). Dad, identifiable by his red head feathers, brings breakfast to Mom.
It’s spectacular footage, if I may say so. I edit down the day’s clips and post it.
— I’m in awe.
— It’s a little emotional!
— Amelia’s hubby is gorgeous!
— Looks like Daddy brought the DoorDash food delivery to Mama.
— Grubhub!
The father’s appearance is a nifty twist. And so, inevitably, we get:
— You must name the father Atticus.
Get it? Gregory Peck’s character in To Kill a Mockingbird? Atticus Finch?
Honestly, Atticus the finch’s parenting style is not great. It’s a master class in doing the minimum. Sometimes, after having been out foraging, he shows up at the nest and feeds Amelia beak-to-beak. But those visits are rare — and on one occasion, he feeds her exactly two seeds and that’s it. She stands there before him, beak wide open, peeping furiously, even pecking at his beak for more. But that’s all he brought.
Nicki objects to naming him Atticus for that very reason. “Atticus is a tall, handsome, principled civil-rights lawyer,” she says. “This bird is a crappy, narcissistic, child-support-evading lowlife.”
Still, it sticks.
Day 8
I wake up to a bunch of notifications. Something’s happened.
I scroll through the tiny thumbnails of the motion-triggered video clips. In one of them, something huge and black fills the frame.
I tap to play it.
In the video, Amelia sits peacefully on the nest. Suddenly, she goes rigid and alert, and bolts out of frame.
Within a second, a crow lands on the sconce, easily six times Amelia’s size. It stares directly into the camera and then makes its move.
It leans into the nest and stabs at the little newborn fuzz ball with its beak, plucking the hatchling like a blueberry from a bush. The crow gives the camera one more cold look and then flies away with the baby.
I get it. It’s nature. It’s the circle of life. It goes on all the time. But it’s so gruesome and close up that tears spring to my eyes.
Only two eggs remain — and now the crow knows they’re there.
I bring the Facebook fans up to date. This time, I don’t include the video in the post. Instead, I provide only an unlisted YouTube link to it accompanied by a warning. (I’ll do you the same courtesy: Here’s the YouTube link. Yeah, it’s upsetting.)
— Wow! That was disturbing.
— Too sad. I can’t watch the video.
Solutions pour in:
— I’m picturing putting chicken wire around the nest so that the finches can come and go but no one else larger.
— Put a picture of a raptor up near the nest.
— Apparently crows don’t like reflective objects, so maybe put up some mylar balloons around the nest. Hang some CDs.
Again, the realist contingent reminds us of the numbers game:
— If every finch egg in your city survived, you wouldn’t be happily watching them. You’d be searching ways to get rid of them.
And then this:
— Do we need to call in an ornithologist for comment?
Wait a second. I know an ornithologist! Only a month ago, I interviewed Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, for a CBS News Sunday Morning story about birds flying into windows.
If anyone knows how to keep the crow from returning, it’s Farnsworth. I email him to ask, “Would any of the anti-crow hacks work?”
In the meantime, I’ve got to do something now. What if the next hatchling becomes crow food too? If I do nothing to prevent it, the Facebook finch followers will never forgive me.
I’m out of town for all of this. Fortunately, Nicki volunteers to attempt the shiny-objects technique.
By this point, it’s 10 p.m. back home and a thunderstorm is roaring. Even worse: As luck would have it, we’re completely out of Mylar strips. We don’t even own any CDs anymore. (We stream.) The only shiny things I can think of are in my precious deluxe boxed set of Monty Python DVDs.
And so, at 10:19 p.m., from my hotel room in upstate Connecticut, I tune in to our front-doorbell camera.
As the lightning flashes, Nicki climbs our metal stepladder. In one hand, she’s carrying a spool of kitchen twine, a roll of duct tape, and five Monty Python discs. Amelia, distressed, zooms around at head level, attempting to ward off her five-foot-four predator.
At last, the job is complete: Five Monty Python discs now dangle in a protective arc around the nest. What crow could penetrate that defensive structure?
But Amelia doesn’t appreciate our gesture. She begins an aerial attack on the DVDs, claws out, striking them on her way past, over and over again.
Finally, after five minutes of battle, she collapses back onto her nest, no doubt confused and exhausted.
— The world is being played out in one little nest.
— I have dozens of AOL discs you could have used.
— Just make sure whatever Monty Python DVD you use does not have the dead parrot sketch in it.
Day 9
I hear back from Cornell’s Andrew Farnsworth about crow defenses:
The vicious circles of life can be difficult to reconcile in the space between straight biology and anthropomorphic morality!
Crows have either exceptional or simply well recognized cognitive abilities, and there will be few, if any, things that will deter them beyond their first or second cautious attempts to examine Mylar and plastic predators! So protection is often for naught and, frankly, can have unintended repercussions for the House Finch.
The only (mostly?) guaranteed approach is diligent and stealthy observation and then precise and direct intervention to scare crows yourself when you see them approaching. All other ruses will likely fail against crows’ explorations and limit tests.
My personal approach: I leave the situation alone, avoid interference, and watch.
I’m a little surprised. I mean, Farnsworth is an expert among experts. He has dedicated his life to studying birds, he campaigns to save birds, he’s a hardcore birder in his spare time. I was sure he would be in the chicken-wire-fortress camp.
But instead, he seems to prefer to let nature take its course. And he seems to be suggesting — very, very gently — that maybe I’m anthropomorphizing these birds just a tad.
Well, never mind that. Today, the third egg has hatched!
She’s super-wriggly and fuzzy. The crowd names her, inevitably, Scout (Atticus’s daughter in Mockingbird, of course).
Atticus the bird seems much more engaged and present than he has been. The finch-family feeding footage is fantastic.
The commenters are bubbling with positive energy again.
— I could not bring myself to watch the video of the crow. I felt sad and horrified when you were describing what had happened. Watching this, however, makes me so relieved and truly joyful that these lil ones still have a chance.
Day 14
Scout’s a week old. Where she was once just a gray fluff ball with a beak, she’s now very big and very squirmy; there’s barely enough room in the nest for the two of them. How on earth would it have worked if all four babies had survived?
Amelia feeds her round the clock. Scout’s little temple tufts make her look like Scrooge McDuck, or maybe Grandpa from The Munsters.
In another finch-cam post, I share the even better news: Since the Monty Python fortifications, the crow has not returned. Never underestimate the power of good British humor.
Really, the only cloud on the nest’s horizon at this point is the way Amelia deals with Scout’s poop: She eats it.
“Birds eat fecal sacs because nestling poop serves as a nutritional treat,” says an Audubon article. “The nestlings cannot completely digest the food that they eat … There is still energy and nutrients available in those sacs.”
Ew.
Then there’s the matter of the final egg. Generally, the eggs are supposed to hatch in rapid succession. But egg No. 4 is still quiet a week after No. 3 hatched. That’s not great.
Farnsworth’s theory: “It was an abnormally warm May — 3-6 degrees F above the 100-year average. Without question, anomalously high temperature could impact viability of eggs.”
— That sad little egg.
— I keep imagining a metaphor for life in there somewhere, but none of them are pleasant.
Day 24, 9:28 p.m.
Scout is taking full advantage of her only-child status. She’s peeping, grooming, stretching, and looking less fuzzy and more feathery by the day.
The parents are playing a new game. It goes like this: They fly down to land on the perimeter. They lean down over Scout, as though about to hand over lunch. Scout, quivering and chirping, opens her yellow beak wide, waiting for the transfer — but the parents just fly away, leaving Scout empty-beaked.
They play endless rounds of this torture. I think the goal is obvious: They’re trying to lure Scout out of the nest. They think it’s time for her to fly.
Mostly, Scout’s taking the bait. During each round, she attempts to launch herself, flapping upward and outward from the bottom of the nest. She makes it a little farther each time. At one point, she succeeds in lifting herself fully out of the nest, furiously flapping and chirping. Surely the first flight is imminent!
— YOU GO, SCOUT!!!
— I’m hooked!
Day 24, 9:51 p.m.
No sooner do I post the previous update than another notification appears. Motion!
I tap. And as I watch, Atticus returns to the nest by himself.
He stands on the sconce, leaning forward and down. Scout faces him, studying, straining.
Atticus turns tail and takes off. And in an instinctive explosion of feathery flapping and cheeping, Scout follows him into the air.
The nest is suddenly still, silent, and — apart from the fourth egg — empty.
Our one surviving finch has left the nest. On Father’s Day!
— Annnd I am crying!
— I’m so proud of her!
— I feel like a parent whose child just left for college. What’ll I do now?!
— This was like the finale of Game of Thrones.
— Happy Father’s Day, empty nester!
— I need a Season Two.
Will Scout be back? Could there be a season two?
It is true that finches often reuse a nest. But for this summer, at least, it’s all over. Our finches haven’t returned to the sconce.
For a while, the camera app gives me only false alarms: a moth fluttering, a spider checking out the lens. Two weeks after the finches’ departure, Nicki gently suggests that I take the tape, the wires, and the camera off the porch wall.
I feel a little low. No more dopamine hits from Wyze notifications. No more legions of breathless finch followers. No more wracked emotions as the finches’ fortunes rise and fall.
And I keep thinking about comments like this one:
— There’s something interesting here about the psychology of why people get so quickly invested in things like this, and how technology has made it possible for everyday people to see nature close up. Yours is just one example.
If this were a movie, I’d be experiencing a montage sequence in which little bits of previously heard dialogue swirl on the soundtrack with heavy reverb:
The psychology of why people get so quickly invested … Very often, the saga of the cute babies does not end well … Their job is actually to raise exactly two to adulthood … The space between straight biology and anthropomorphic morality …
I email Farnsworth one more time. Now I’m looking for context.
Should I feel foolish at having become so invested in the life of one single hatchling, from one brood, in one nest, on one porch?
Have we all been had by baby-bird cuteness? Was the story of Amelia’s family nothing more than a typical game of averages in which one surviving hatchling is a perfectly good result? Was it true that “if every finch egg survived, you’d be searching ways to get rid of them”?
Farnsworth answers:
Four is a lot, if all survive.
The clutch size range is 2–7 eggs, and there may be 4–5 clutches [batches of eggs] per season. So a female may lay 8–35 eggs per year.
And regarding survival: Remember that the House Finch was introduced in the eastern U.S., originating from Southwest deserts. So though the House Finch is not overwhelming us, populations in the eastern U.S. are increasing, while origin-area populations are decreasing.
Wait, what? This isn’t even a native species? And its population is going up around here?
But he adds:
I don’t think it’s silly to get invested; it is, bottom line, a good thing to care about something else, to balance our care for ourselves. But part of this equation should be learning the bigger picture:
Cats kill a lot more birds than that crow every day … the foods the parents are feeding their young are changing as people plant different garden vegetation and land use changes … the rapidly changing climate is going to be a much bigger problem than the dynamics at this one nest.
The singular fascination with one nestling, or one family, that connects someone to the world, that’s a great thing. But when it becomes the only thing … that’s a problem.
I guess it’s possible that we got swept away by anthropomorphism: naming the birds, ascribing thoughts and motives to them, allowing our own feelings to rise and fall with them. The only thing that made this bird unusual is that I trained a $35 camera on it.
But we aren’t purely rational beings. I can’t erase the astonishment of seeing that tiny egg crack in two, the horror of seeing the crow attack, the exultation at seeing Scout flap away for the first time. It was all real.
We have a couple of bird feeders in the backyard. They get a ton of traffic: grackles, goldfinches, blue jays, woodpeckers, robins, mourning doves — and house finches.
I try to keep context and population averages in mind when I watch them, I really do. And frankly, the finches all look alike. It’s impossible to know if any of them are Amelia, Atticus, or Scout.
But every couple of days, I do see a set of three finches on that feeder, and sometimes just a little one by itself. Maybe it’s Scout, maybe it’s not.
Either way, wherever she is, I’m happy that I know where she came from.
Photo: David Pogue
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