What this is

A go/no-go scorer for birding at Whiskey Island, the Cleveland lakefront peninsula whose eastern tip is Wendy Park. Updated nightly. Built May 2026 to answer one question: was Saturday 5/16 worth the 30-minute drive? Grew into a seven-factor rubric with a backtest.

First run for tomorrow: raw 9.77, final 10.0. That is the answer. The rest is showing the work.

tomorrow's score →

How the score works

Seven factors, each rated 0–10, then combined as a weighted sum. The weights below add to 1.00.

seasonal_phenologyw 0.25

Peak warbler window on Whiskey Island is roughly 5/12–5/18. Heaviest factor on purpose. The birds have to be in town.

wind_regimew 0.20

Overnight south winds push migrants north up the Mississippi flyway. They pile against the Lake Erie shore at sunrise.

migration_intensityw 0.15

BirdCast Cuyahoga County nightly traffic forecast. Birds aloft last night and tonight.

precipitation_patternw 0.15

Short dawn rain grounds migrants in the trees. That is a fallout. All-day rain is just wet.

ebird_recent_activityw 0.10

Recent checklists from L284586 (the Wendy Park eBird hotspot). Reality check on the model.

barometric_pressure_trendw 0.08

Rising pressure after a front clears means clean post-frontal air and lots of birds.

time_window_qualityw 0.07

Dawn arrival vs. sunrise. How much of the first hour you actually catch.

On top of the weighted sum, four amplifiers push the score higher when conditions stack:

• fallout setup (south wind + dawn rain + high traffic)
• new-moon (less collision risk, more grounded birds)
• peak-week (inside 5/12–5/18)
• peak-week dawn rain (rare alignment)

Plus a peak-phenology floor. Inside the peak window the final score will not collapse below a minimum even if wind or rain misbehave. The birds are here.

Known calibration issues

The score is a model estimate, not a verdict. Naturalist-validated misses are tracked here so the rank line on /today reads honestly.

• Pass-through false positiveSat 5/16/2026

  Photo-mode list score read 9.0+, naturalist on-site call said the field was dead. Model missed the bypass setup; the pass-through penalty signal needs more weight.
• Rank vs. naturalist disagreementWed 5/13/2026

  Model ranked Wednesday outside the top morning of the week; on-site reports flagged it as the actual best day. Best-day claims are estimates — verify with field reports.
• Best-day orderingMay 2026

  Backtest correlation is +0.418, not +1.0. Day-to-day rank inside a peak week is the model's weakest signal. Treat #1 vs. #2 inside the same band as a coin-flip until field data ships.

Full calibration notes live in the repo at docs/calibration_may_2026.md.

Sources

Everything is public or freely accessible. No tracking, no paywalls, no scraping where an API exists.

• NOAA — hourly forecasthttps://api.weather.govWind, precipitation, pressure, temperature for the Whiskey Island grid.
• BirdCast — nightly migrationhttps://dashboard.birdcast.org/api/v1/is-birdcast-alert-api/Cuyahoga County migration alert level and last-night traffic count (hidden JSON API behind the dashboard).
• eBird API 2.0https://api.ebird.org/v2Recent observations at hotspot L284586 and species-level frequency.
• sunrise-sunset.org + USNO RSTThttps://sunrise-sunset.orgSunrise time and lunar phase / illumination.
• Wikipedia pageimageshttps://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/Species thumbnails — blank gray box if Wikimedia has nothing.
• BirdWeatherhttps://app.birdweather.com/graphqlAcoustic detection counts from local PUC stations.
• NEXRAD KCLE — radarhttps://noaa-nexrad-level2.s3.amazonaws.comLevel-II radar from AWS open data, used for the dawn-donut signature (local-only).
• Cleveland Lights Outhttps://www.lightsoutcle.orgCollision-risk and lights-out advisory context.