tagging bird hides

Any idea how I should do this? I searched the wiki for bird hides and nothing came up.

Do you have any suggestions? Try with something similar, in the same category and then try to expand on that.

OK, Iā€™ll have a look around at whatā€™s been done in other places / with similar things

I suggest they should be tagged as amenity - hide (I notice that some people have put in benches in this way). Alternatively it could go under tourism (equivalent to viewpoint). Iā€™d suggest ā€˜hideā€™ rather than ā€˜bird hideā€™ because some hides are for other animals.

So should I just go ahead and tag like this, or is there somewhere on the wiki where I should make this suggestion more formally? Apologies for all the questions but Iā€™m new here and donā€™t want to mess things upā€¦

Itā€™s a very good question, and let me tell you what I would do I would go to the wiki page Tag:amenity=hide and describe what it is you want to map be very verbose ā€œwrite for a ten-year oldā€, and what other tags you think should go there: e.g.
animals=birds
note=ā€œusually you can also see Black-browed Albatrosses hereā€

also put a cateogry in it like this:
[[Category:Animals]]

The right way would be to put it as a proposal first. :slight_smile: But this way is better

I had the same problem the other day, and resorted to man_made=hide.

If you read german its worth consulting the following wiki article on hunting tower hides: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Hochsitze.

I think the tagging requires more thought. As disgruntled says they may be for more than one purpose: bird or mammal watching, hunting. Tower hides bear a striking resemblance to watch towers at prisons or in forests. It was for this reason that I opted for a man_made tag: the fact that hides of various types are often significant geographical features being ahead of their actual usage or amenity/tourist value (which are more thematic attributes). A secondary consideration is that in countries where hunting is popular, private hides far outnumber ones with open or permissive access.

It is also worth noting that hides differ in appearance and structure. The typical UK hide as seen at RSBP, Wildlife Trust etc. reserves is relatively rare, for example, in Switzerland (e.g., Neerarcher Reid) compared with tower or platform hides (e.g., the following all unmapped in OSM Klingnauer Stausee or the Kaltbrunner Reid).

Iā€™m too much of a newbie to form a coherent proposal at this stage, but something which covers the range of tower hides, hochsitze, screens, ā€˜pillboxesā€™, platforms, and 'traditional hides (which may also be regarded as building=yes) is needed. It would be nice to put this detail in for highly frequented places such as the RSBP reserves in East Anglia, Welney or Rutland Water (latter with 3 hides tagged amenity=hide, building=yes).

I must say I have only seen moose/deer hunting shelters, are all hides for hunting?

Use of hunting hides is obviously dependant on the fauna (geo-tagged user locations really help with context here: not much moose hunting in Britain in the past thousands of years). In Germany I expect its mainly deer, but in Spain Wild Boar are popular as well. I get the impression in France it could be anything with feathers or four legs. In Britain the majority of hides are likely to be used by bird-watchers and similar. Therefore I donā€™t think hunting is a suitable generic tag, although the Hochsitze wiki page discusses most of the issues that have occurred to me, and seems a good place to start from.

Ah - this is where my lack of German is going to be a barrier.

I had got as far as thinking:

amenity=hide (there are 14 of these tags already according to tagwatch for the UK)

with the further properties of purpose (hunting/watching) and maybe how accessible they are (some have ramps, some have only step access- I assume thereā€™s already some sort of accessibility tag defined for other buildings?) and building=yes (for those which are buildings - some are pretty makeshift sort of structures). My thinking for including them was that reserves could then use OSM to produce their own route maps and for bird watchers at least, hides are a key part of planning a route, so I was thinking of them as destinations in their own right rather than landmarks.

It sounds like the german hochsitze concept is sufficiently different that a hide tag for the birdwatching-type hides would still be needed

Maybe Iā€™ll do this properly as a proposal and get some wider discussion. I too am a newbie but am willing to stick my head above the parapet and have a goā€¦ hopefully I wonā€™t be shot down in flames by a bunch of German hunters!

From mailinglist:

thoughts?

I wasnā€™t really aware of this forum, so I never thought to look here!

The thread I started on the talk list:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-January/033067.html

My draft proposal:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/bird_hide

I think wildlife_hide is reasonable because as categories, birds are within wildlife, and many hides let you watch both.

Hides can definitely be destinations - a local hide has visitors from 200 miles away because it has a reputation for close views of certain birds.

Hunters would not be welcome! I see hides for hunting as a separate thing.

There are arguments for using the amenity, building, leisure and man_made keys.

I think man_made over amenity. Amenity is intended for "useful and important facilities for visitors and residents: toilets, telephones, banks, pharmacies (to buy medicines), schools ā€¦ " - hides arenā€™t exactly essential

There are various proposals for buildings going on:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Building

Seems many of these overlap with amenities and man_mades

Iā€™ll put some of this on the wiki page

cheers,
LT

Summarised:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/bird_hide

Ah cheers, glad someone has taken up the baton!

Thanks LT.

I think wildlife_hide sits as a suitable compromise between admirable but largely unusable abstract generic concepts and tag proliferation. I strongly support use of man_made over leisure and amenity. Iā€™ll use this tag on the sites Iā€™ve mentioned. Obviously, Iā€™ll have to start learning to edit wiki pages and send messages to listservs.

You can always tag it with tourism=attraction and man_made=wildlife_hide. This would capture both the tourism aspect and the man made aspect to the hide. I disagree with using leisure as the key, the nature reserve itself is tagged as leisure, or the forest as a forest.