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)
Birding bloopers #3
Over the last two days I’ve reported some of the bloopers other birders have reported on BIRDCHAT. Here is yet another one – actually, today you get two for the price of one, both from Kathy:
While in Alaska at a B&B at dusk I was unpacking my car and there was a Great Horned Owl in the tree. Oh boy as I shot off a roll only to discover that it was a fake one.
Another, in the Central Valley in CA during Snow Geese time there was a lone Snow Goose and I was taking a few photographs when a couple of hunters sitting a little way off said that the Snow Geese were behind me. I was photographing a decoy!
Birding bloopers #2
Yesterday I wrote about some of the mistakes I, and others have made trying to identify birds. Sometimes what we think is a bird is something else completely, something like a stone that looks like a bird at first glance. Other birders have similar experiences, I’m happy to report, like Steve admitted on BIRDCHAT:
The one blooper that my (non-birding) family will never let me forget: We were driving on the highway in the suburbs of Minneapolis, when I spotted a large bird perched on a fence post. My initial ID’s of some kind of hawk… no! an owl! … were met with prolonged laughter when we discovered a it was a cat sitting on top of the post. It is hard to travel that road with my family without them snickering, even now, years later. Birders are far more forgetful and forgiving.
Steve
Confusing a cat with an owl or hawk?
Even my identification skills are somewhat better than that.
And I know a good optometrist I could recommend to Steve.
Birding bloopers #1
As in all human pursuits, mistakes are made. Even by seemingly experienced people. And birders are no exception to this rule. I’ve lost count of the number of stones, rocks, sticks, protruding parts of branches and a range of other things that, at first glance, had to be something special, an unusual bird, the species I’d been looking for all day or just a good sighting.
Then training the binoculars on said “bird” one discovers its true identity. It is quite a letdown feeling one gets, and if another person is with you, it can be downright embarrassing, like Mark did in this account from BIRDCHAT:
Years ago I was birding with a friend on Salthouse Heath, Norfolk. Our targets included nightingale and nightjar. In the falling dusk, everything reduced to silhouettes we were surprised to find a Ring-necked Pheasant roosting in a bush top, its tail cocked as if in alarm, but as we approached it didn’t flush – just sat there. Closer and closer we walked until we finally realised our mistake – it was a saucepan (long-handled cooking pot) someone must have flung out of a passing car, that had landed handle uppermost. And when we did finally track down the churring nightjar and came closer and closer to it, what did we find but a birder playing a tape-recording. Double blooped!
Mark