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Tuesday 22 January 2019

Lapwing Quiz; The Results

So here's the original photo, which I gave people 15 seconds to look at before making their guesstimates of how many Lapwing are on the shingle island...



A total of fifteen replies gave answers varying from 226 to 900. And a quick calculation of these revealed the mean answer to be 496, which is precisely 29 less than the correct answer of 525...



Thanks to all who got involved with the fun and well done to the closest two; @hjwright99 with 521 and @alexmxck with 520. You win exactly nothing, but hold your heads high....well unless you cheated of course!

I took this photo on Saturday when there were at least 1,500 Lapwing on Black Hole Marsh, it was completely crammed full of them...



Along with a Greenshank, about 30 Snipe and 26 Dunlin...

Roosting Dunlin


Off the beach there's still four Common Scoter, plus yesterday a group of five Red-throated Divers flew west whilst I happened to be watching (well chatting to Roger actually!). I have been checking the gulls on the Estuary whenever I've had the chance, sadly no further sign of Gav's Caspian with nothing else of note either.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the answer. I'll have to double my guesstimate next time!

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    Replies
    1. Haha. Didn't give you much time though! In reality they were just sat that.

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  2. In the BBC program 'The Code', Marcus du Sautoy revealed a hidden numerical code that underpinned all nature.
    One test was like the above, where people were asked to guess how many items there were in a jar.
    No one guessed correctly. The guesses were vastly different. But when the guesses were averaged out - it was almost correct.

    The Lapwing quiz demonstrates the principle. Good to see so many of them btw.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Ric. Really interesting thanks very much for sharing - yes it is amazing how the average between such vast guesses is often the correct one!

      Delete

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    ReplyDelete