Birds in the News
A digest of articles called Birds in the News #70 has just been posted in the blog called Living the Scientific Life.
There are links to many interesting articles about birds that have featured in the news over the last week or so, including some on endangered birds.
Birds in Tasmania
If you want to see some beautiful photos of Australian birds, can I recommend the blog Birds in Tasmania?
Tasmania, the island state to the south of the Australian mainland, has a rich fauna a flora and has several species of birds only found there. I have yet to experience the delights of birding and touring Tasmania, so looking at this site is the next best thing. The site has a group of contributors who blog about their birding experiences in Tasmania. Each post is usually accompanied by a series of photos of the birds seen. These photos are always of the highest quality. Highly recommended.
Link:
Don’t get caught short: toilets in Australia
2 Comments »12th February, 2007; Category: General
It is amazing what one can find on the internet. I recently read on a post to Birding-Aus a reference to a very informative web page. The writer referred to the National Public Toilet Map. This site lists many (but not all) public toilets with a map showing its location and details of the facilities available and the opening times. Very helpful.
I now have this vision of anxious people with pained expressions on their faces running around with their laptops searching for a public toilet. Still, it could be useful when out birding in an area new to you. Of course, you’d need to check the map before leaving home. I guess it won’t be long before you can access such a site on your mobile phone – in fact, some phones may already be enabled to do that.
A Sitting Duck
This week’s idiom: “A sitting duck.”
Meaning:
Someone or something that is ‘a sitting duck’ is an easy to hit target. Someone who is a ‘sitting duck’ is open to an easy physical or verbal attack.
Origin:
This expression quite obviously comes from hunters, and duck shooters in particular. A sitting duck, on merely bobbing on the surface of the water, as opposed to one swimming, diving, dabbling or flying, is an easy target for the shooter.
Example:
Left alone on stage, he was completely at the mercy of the angry crowd. James felt like a sitting duck.
Disclaimer 1: The writer of this blog in no way endorses duck shooting.
Disclaimer 2: No ducks, nor any other birds, were harmed in taking the photo below.
Please note: the photo below is of a STANDING duck. I don’t have a photo of a sitting duck – yet.
UPDATE: I should point out the the bird shown in the photo is an Australian Wood Duck. The Wood Duck found in North America is quite a different species.
Australian Wood Duck (male)
Bird word: Field Guide
- Field Guide: a book giving details of all the birds found in a region or country. Field guides usually include colour illustrations of the birds, descriptive notes to help identify the bird and a distribution map.
When I was growing up in the 1950s the only reliable and comprehensive field guide to Australian birds was Neville Cayley’s “What Bird is That?” It wasn’t my copy, it belonged to my older brother but I tended to use it far more than he did. In my later teen years I acquired my own copy, the lesser quality but far cheaper paperback version.
When I first married and we started having family camping holidays, often in the Flinders Ranges, I bought the two volume “A field guide to Australian Birds” by Peter Slater. I used this guide alongside the beautiful, but cumbersome Reader’s Digest “Complete Book of Australian Birds.” This wonderful volume is not truly a field guide, because it uses photos instead of paintings for the illustrations and can be a little misleading as a result. Its strength is the text and I still refer to it frequently. Its major weakness is its size and weight; far too big and heavy to use as a field guide.
The 1980s saw the publication of Graham Pizzey’s “The Field Guide to the Birds of Australia” (illustrated by Doyle). This was, in my opinion, far superior to any previous publication and it has remained a favourite of mine ever since. It travels with me everywhere; in fact, it lives permanently in the car. It is also starting to fall apart despite several repair jobs.
In 1997 Graham Pizzey published a new, much revised version, this time beautifully illustrated by Frank Knight. This is a far easier to use, compact, easily carried in the field, well illustrated and with an authoritative text. It is the volume I now consult most frequently.
I do have an early edition of Simpson and Day’s “The Birds of Australia” but I find this volume sadly lacking in the text although the illustrations are quite good. I would not have bought this volume myself; it was a gift. The later editions (it’s up the 7th edition) may be much better but I haven’t checked it out.
More recently Michael Morcombe has produced a new field guide which I understand is quite good. I can’t really comment except to say that I’ve only briefly looked at it several times in bookshops. My thin wallet and my crowded bookshelf both say that I don’t really need another field guide.
For my trip overseas late 2005 and early 2006 I bought two field guides for the trip:
- The Birds of South-East Asia (for use in Thailand)
- A Field Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent (for use in Nepal).
Both proved very useful and studying them on the plane on the long flight over there proved useful in filling in the long hours. I had also been studying them for many months previous to my trip. (See my travel blog for details and photos of my trip.)