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.