Field Notes

Half the gloves arrive in two months

Half of every glove in the catalogue was found in December or January. Across the six months from May to October there are 43 gloves, fewer than in a single December.

A winter spike on its own would not mean much, since it could reflect a collector who walked more in cold weather. The banana peels rule that out. They were photographed by the same person on the same walks, and they peak in March. A third of them fall in the six months when gloves are nearly absent. The two categories do not move together, so the glove pattern is not an artefact of when the photographs were taken.

The gloves found in summer are a different kind of glove

Winter knits make up most of the cold-month finds and then largely disappear. Work gloves become the largest summer category, and together with disposables they account for two thirds of everything found between May and October.

In cold weather the gloves people lose are the ones they were wearing to keep warm. In July most belong to people working outdoors. The summer figures rest on 43 gloves, so they describe a small population.

In April 2020 half the gloves were disposable

Disposable gloves accounted for 5 to 7% of finds through 2018 and 2019. The Netherlands entered lockdown on 15 March 2020.

The change does not appear in the counts. 2020 was the largest year for gloves and for peels alike, which indicates more walking rather than more gloves. The change is only visible in what the gloves were. The share does not return to its earlier level. 2021, 2022 and 2023 all sit at 12.5%.

Gloves arrive in runs

Shuffling the locations while holding the timestamps fixed produces about 22 close pairs. The catalogue contains 132. None of two thousand simulations reached that figure.

The longest run is seven gloves in one walk, on 1 January 2018.

Eighty-three of these were picked up and put somewhere

Gloves appear on tree branches, wedged into bark, on café benches, on lamp posts, on a canal railing above the water, inside bicycle frames, pushed into tree-guard cages, in window planters, and on a stack of boxes marked FRAGILE.

Peels were moved more often than gloves. They appear on a discarded mattress, on the roof of a car, in a plant pot, and posted into a wall-mounted cigarette bin.

A glove is usually put where it can be seen, on the assumption that whoever lost it might come back for it. A peel tends to end up on a ledge or in a planter because there was no bin nearby.

No disposable glove was ever moved

Moving a dropped object assumes an owner who might return for it. A used disposable glove has no such owner, and 72 out of 72 stayed where they landed.