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cincinnatus_c
Technically, today will not have been the last day before late summer that the temperature fails to reach 20C, because it was over 20 for a couple of hours after midnight, but it will have been the last day it fails to reach 20 in the daytime--which seems like as good an occasion as any to get around to posting this here graph I done made of the dates the University of Waterloo weather station's first-time-to-20-degrees contest has ended since the contest started in 1998:
So what does that tell you? Obviously, it tells you that it is disturbingly easy to draw totally unfounded conclusions from numbers that look like data, data that looks like information, and lines that look like trends. Well, OK, it gives you some reason to believe that it has been abnormally cold in southern Ontario for three springs in a row now, which, by more or less any measure, is definitely true. If you'd like another highly arbitrary measure: it got below freezing at Bancroft airport on June 14. For another: after I said on May 9 that there had been snow on the ground through the previous night, some snow fell again each of the next three days, such that for I am absolutely sure the first time in my life it snowed where I was on each of the five days leading up to my birthday. June on the whole hasn't been particularly cold; it's been particularly swingy: Peterborough airport has recorded four high temperatures over 30, and five low temperatures below 5. (Any low temperature below 5 represents a real risk of frost; normally around here you don't have to think about frost after about the third week of May. But fortunately we didn't actually get frost here, and so all my plants survived for the groundhogs, deer, raccoons, stinkbugs, squash vine borers, spotted asparagus beetles (which are this year's new horror of the year), and whatever the hell else is still to come.)
While I'm dumping "data" here, today I happened to submit my 200th complete checklist to ebird.org (and one for the 93rd day in a row--COVID-world has been great for birding)--the very large majority of which have been from around the house here, with a few from the cottage and a small scattering from other places. Amazingly, black-capped chickadees have appeared on all but 11 of those checklists. Here, I am sure you will be interested to know, are the top 15 most frequently counted birds I have counted, in number of complete checklists they have appeared on:
1. Black-capped chickadee: 189
2. White-breasted nuthatch: 176
3. American goldfinch: 165
4. Mourning dove: 152
5. Downy woodpecker: 142
6. Hairy woodpecker: 134
7. American crow: 127
8. Blue jay: 107
9. American robin: 77
10. Purple finch: 67
11. Eastern phoebe: 62
12. Red-winged blackbird: 37
13. Red-eyed vireo: 36
14. Red-breasted nuthatch: 33
15. Song sparrow: 30
The fact that the three species whose names start with "red" appear consecutively reminds me that today I looked up the boxscore of the game between the Blue Jays and Orioles on August 24, 1983, in which Tippy Martinez picked off three consecutive Jays in the top of the 10th inning, to confirm that that was a thing that really happened. (Today's rabbit-hole of stats digging was prompted by my dreaming this morning that Vlad Jr. had hit for the cycle with three home runs. It was surprisingly difficult to confirm that no one has ever done that in the majors. I didn't even get as far as finding out how many guys have hit for the cycle with two home runs, but Joe DiMaggio is the only guy to do that twice, and Joe DiMaggio and Adrian Beltre are the only guys to hit three home runs and hit for the cycle in games less than a week apart.) Tippy Martinez recorded 310 outs that year; five of them came by pickoff, and three of those five came consecutively, at the worst possible time for a Jays fan who had only just turned old enough to have his heart broken: the Jays would've been half a game back of the Orioles for first place if they'd won that game; instead, it kicked off a tailspin that had them 7.5 games out by the end of the month. I was surprised to see that before those three pickoffs--which I've always remembered being stunned by, listening to the game on the radio with my parents at the cottage--Cliff Johnson had hit a solo homer to put the Jays up 4-3. (They'd been up 3-1 with two out in the bottom of the 9th; with two runners on, Bobby Cox pulled Jim Clancy one out shy of the complete game, and then Dave Geisel gave up back-to-back RBI singles.) But Cal Ripken led off the bottom of the 10th with a home run, and then Lenny Sakata walked it off with a two-out, three-run homer off Randy Moffitt, who I always remember had some horrible tropical disease that really badly disturbed me to read about as a kid.
The bird I have most recently counted for the first time from around the house here is the yellow-billed cuckoo, which is a real thing that really lives around here. Really.
--
Currently under my porch: 16.7. Currently at Belmont Lake: 16.7. High there today: 20.5, just after 1 a.m.
So what does that tell you? Obviously, it tells you that it is disturbingly easy to draw totally unfounded conclusions from numbers that look like data, data that looks like information, and lines that look like trends. Well, OK, it gives you some reason to believe that it has been abnormally cold in southern Ontario for three springs in a row now, which, by more or less any measure, is definitely true. If you'd like another highly arbitrary measure: it got below freezing at Bancroft airport on June 14. For another: after I said on May 9 that there had been snow on the ground through the previous night, some snow fell again each of the next three days, such that for I am absolutely sure the first time in my life it snowed where I was on each of the five days leading up to my birthday. June on the whole hasn't been particularly cold; it's been particularly swingy: Peterborough airport has recorded four high temperatures over 30, and five low temperatures below 5. (Any low temperature below 5 represents a real risk of frost; normally around here you don't have to think about frost after about the third week of May. But fortunately we didn't actually get frost here, and so all my plants survived for the groundhogs, deer, raccoons, stinkbugs, squash vine borers, spotted asparagus beetles (which are this year's new horror of the year), and whatever the hell else is still to come.)
While I'm dumping "data" here, today I happened to submit my 200th complete checklist to ebird.org (and one for the 93rd day in a row--COVID-world has been great for birding)--the very large majority of which have been from around the house here, with a few from the cottage and a small scattering from other places. Amazingly, black-capped chickadees have appeared on all but 11 of those checklists. Here, I am sure you will be interested to know, are the top 15 most frequently counted birds I have counted, in number of complete checklists they have appeared on:
1. Black-capped chickadee: 189
2. White-breasted nuthatch: 176
3. American goldfinch: 165
4. Mourning dove: 152
5. Downy woodpecker: 142
6. Hairy woodpecker: 134
7. American crow: 127
8. Blue jay: 107
9. American robin: 77
10. Purple finch: 67
11. Eastern phoebe: 62
12. Red-winged blackbird: 37
13. Red-eyed vireo: 36
14. Red-breasted nuthatch: 33
15. Song sparrow: 30
The fact that the three species whose names start with "red" appear consecutively reminds me that today I looked up the boxscore of the game between the Blue Jays and Orioles on August 24, 1983, in which Tippy Martinez picked off three consecutive Jays in the top of the 10th inning, to confirm that that was a thing that really happened. (Today's rabbit-hole of stats digging was prompted by my dreaming this morning that Vlad Jr. had hit for the cycle with three home runs. It was surprisingly difficult to confirm that no one has ever done that in the majors. I didn't even get as far as finding out how many guys have hit for the cycle with two home runs, but Joe DiMaggio is the only guy to do that twice, and Joe DiMaggio and Adrian Beltre are the only guys to hit three home runs and hit for the cycle in games less than a week apart.) Tippy Martinez recorded 310 outs that year; five of them came by pickoff, and three of those five came consecutively, at the worst possible time for a Jays fan who had only just turned old enough to have his heart broken: the Jays would've been half a game back of the Orioles for first place if they'd won that game; instead, it kicked off a tailspin that had them 7.5 games out by the end of the month. I was surprised to see that before those three pickoffs--which I've always remembered being stunned by, listening to the game on the radio with my parents at the cottage--Cliff Johnson had hit a solo homer to put the Jays up 4-3. (They'd been up 3-1 with two out in the bottom of the 9th; with two runners on, Bobby Cox pulled Jim Clancy one out shy of the complete game, and then Dave Geisel gave up back-to-back RBI singles.) But Cal Ripken led off the bottom of the 10th with a home run, and then Lenny Sakata walked it off with a two-out, three-run homer off Randy Moffitt, who I always remember had some horrible tropical disease that really badly disturbed me to read about as a kid.
The bird I have most recently counted for the first time from around the house here is the yellow-billed cuckoo, which is a real thing that really lives around here. Really.
--
Currently under my porch: 16.7. Currently at Belmont Lake: 16.7. High there today: 20.5, just after 1 a.m.
Please don't tell me about your dreams.
Date: 2020-06-25 06:55 am (UTC)