Needless to say, I've gotten pretty excited about this active house finch nest so close to my house and in such an accessible location. Today after work I continued my routine monitoring photos, and then I took an old $20 black-and-white CCD camera I had sitting around and wired it up to an old TV. I stuck the camera to the ceiling near the nest for an unobtrusive view into the activities of the mother and her brood. (picture here)

It works great! The little TV in the laundry room plays Bird TV constantly. Though mostly the chicks just sleep, every now and then the mother returns with some food and then everyone goes ape. Anyway, this improved view has confirmed that there are, in fact, four babies. I don't currently have it set up to be able to framegrab directly off the camera NTSC signal, so I had to resort to taking photographs of the TV screen... I apologize for the abysmal quality.

Here are the interesting pictures from today that I was around to take pictures of the TV for.