# What are the chances that a bird will poop on my car?

This question was posed as a scenario of mathematics in everyday life. Some googling led to Randall “XKCD” Munroe’s post here. Borrowing similar ideas leads to my own computation below.
I park at an open air carpark for work. The easy assumptions are my car has a 4.3m x 1.75m footprint and I park for 8 hours a day. For data on birds, after some searching I found a 2016 article that estimates (provided I interpreted correctly) a total of 377 birds in 113 hectares of built-up area at another university in the country. So if we assume a similar bird population here and that birds poop uniformly everywhere once every hour,
$\frac{377}{113 \times 10,000} \times 8 \times 4.3 \times 1.75 \approx 2\%$

In my opinion, the estimate is on the low side. In practical terms, it appears birds spend a large amount on time perched on trees. I also read that birds tend to clear their vowels to lighten their loads before they fly. So it is a catch-22 for me. I either park in the shade under trees and risk being bombarded or I park in the open and find myself a 40 degrees oven when I leave work on a typical sunny afternoon.

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