I have recently used the app that provides an audio guide to walks at JWNR. This in my view is excellent with informative content and a pleasant narrative style. Useful maps too. There is quite a bit about the bird life.
If I might talk about one of a small number of quibbles it concerns, yet again, the ‘hides’ issue. The app says there are 3 hides at Kelly Swamp, and one ‘blind’ (the Snipe structure). The difference between a hide
and a blind is not explained.
A look at a few dictionaries shows that in the days of the shooter a ‘hide’, which might take various forms, was the British term for what was known in North America as a ‘blind’. Bird observers and photographers must
now outnumber shooters by a factor of several hundreds. The use of different terms has changed accordingly. Wikipedia says: ‘A bird hide (blind or bird blind in North America) is a shelter, often camouflaged, that is used to observe wildlife, especially birds,
at close quarters …’. However, Wikipedia then lists ‘bird blind’ as a ‘variant’ of a hide, being ‘ [a] screen similar to one wall of a typical hide, with or without a roof for shelter’.
However, usage is far from uniform. I think it is true to say that outside Australia ‘hide and ‘blind’ remain synonymous: https://birdwatchworld.com/what-is-a-bird-blind/
https://birdwatchworld.com/how-do-bird-blinds-work/
In the UK a bird blind seems to be a household accessory with pictures of birds on it.
That leaves the question of any separate usage in Australia. It is difficult to find examples. Wikipedia mentions a 2002 Birds Australia information sheet which does not refer to ‘blinds’.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061219191434/http://www.birdsaustralia.com.au/infosheets/08_hides.pdf
In my view, if ‘blind’ is to be brought into use for a particular kind of hide, the brush fence at Kelly Swamp with the viewing apertures, next to Bittern Hide, is certainly one of them – or should that be several of
them?
