Hard-to-Explain Repetitions

 In the post here I reported an astonishing anomaly regarding purple flowers in my back yard. It's a rather long story, so I won't repeat it in this post. The anomaly was followed by another very strange anomaly. 

What was extremely odd was that it seemed on at least three and possibly four occasions prior to July 22, I noticed a sparrow in my back yard, seemingly in exactly the same spot, and facing in the same direction. The spot was about two meters away from my house's rear first-floor window, and about one meter to the right of the left fence wall. It seemed that in each case the bird was on the concrete ground, about three or four meters from some planters we have near the right wall of the back yard. 

Because the back yard of my house is solid concrete, it is very odd that a bird would appear at such a position, at least two meters away from anything that would interest a bird. What was most strange was that I had seemed to notice the bird at exactly this position on at least three days during the five preceding days of looking out my window first thing in the morning, between July 16 and July 21. I almost never look out that window. 

I have been a student of paranormal phenomena for a very long time, and I have never heard of any anomaly involving repetitive appearances of birds. So you can imagine how often such a repetition would have had to occur to attract my attention.  No one would have noticed such a thing after merely two repetitions. 

By July 22 because of such repeating observations I had resolved to start recording exactly what I observed regarding such a pattern. On that morning the first two times I looked out the back window (at intervals separated by at least ten minutes), I saw a bird at the exact position described above. The third and fourth times I looked out the window, I saw no such bird. On the fifth time I looked out, I once again saw a bird at the exact position described above.  In all six or seven of these "appearance repetition" cases between about July 16 and July 22, the bird seemed to be in the same position, facing in the same direction, on concrete ground at least two meters from anything that should interest a bird. 

Today (July 23) I saw no repetitions of the pattern, and seemed to see no birds at all in my back yard, despite checking it about 10 times. 

The observed pattern seems fantastically unlikely to have occurred. There are perhaps 1000 ways in which a bird could appear in my back yard, counting all possible positions and orientations.  In a consecutive series of about 20 observations of my back yard during a period of about 6 days between July 16 and July 22, I seemed to have seen at least six or seven repetitions of a bird in the same position, facing in the same direction. I never saw more than 2 or 3 birds in the back yard during any of these days. 

The probability of such a thing seems much, much smaller than the chance of you picking the Queen of Diamonds six or seven times if you did twenty different card picks, each from a random position in a freshly shuffled full deck of cards. 

Postscript: Between July 26 and July 28 I noticed another hard-to-explain repetitive bird pattern with a starting point the same as the one mentioned above. About five different times I noticed a bird appearing at the exact spot described in the post above, and then always flying along the exact same path, crossing over the rear right corner of my back yard, from a starting point of near the opposite corner of my back yard.  The flight path is shown by the red arrow below:

Red-breasted birds are rather uncommon in New York City (where I live). We get very many pigeons and sparrows, but not many red-breasted birds. On August 3 when returning from a walk outside, I noticed a red-breasted bird (probably a robin) resting in the middle of the gutter atop the house where I live. It was joined by three other black birds. The next time I left the house (August 4) I noticed a red-breasted bird (apparently also a robin) in the same spot I noticed the red-breasted bird when returning the previous day: in the middle of the house's front gutter. Those gutters were replaced in the past year, and are not blocked; and also it has not rained in New York City in the past three days (August 4, 3, and 2). 

The pdf file here lists very many birds seen in New York City, and lists the American robin as one of more than 30 types of birds commonly seen in New York City (also listing dozens of other types of birds as being common in the summer).  What are the odds of seeing a red-breasted bird in the same high spot atop your house on two consecutive observations of the front of your house, on different days? Very tiny, it would seem. 

The next day (August 5) I saw another improbable bird event.  The first time I opened the second-floor window curtain on that day, an instant after I opened the curtain a bird flew up and landed right in front of me, as close as it could be, with only a window separating us. There was nothing nearby of any interest to a bird -- just a window and the bricks in front of it. 

Post-postscript (September 16): Having seen no repetitions in September of the bird pattern I saw three times on July 22, despite looking out my back window 75+ times in September, I am all the more impressed that on that day the pattern occurred on three of the five times I checked, all at different times separated by at least ten minutes.