A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
hide
A hide is a small structure built to watch wildlife from without being seen, with a bench and a slot to look through, sited where birds or mammals will come and reached by a path that keeps the approach out of sight. Americans call the same thing a blind. The design problem is entirely about scent, silhouette, and sound rather than about comfort.
Etymology
English has three separate words here and they are all old. The wildlife hide is from the verb meaning to conceal. The animal hide is a different Old English word for skin. And a hide of land is a third word, an Anglo-Saxon unit of assessment used throughout Domesday Book, notionally the amount of land that would support one household, which varied enormously and was really a tax measure.
Notes
The oldest hides in Britain were built for the study of birds rather than for shooting, and the practice was established by photographers in the early twentieth century who needed to be within a few feet of a nest. A floating hide, a tank of a thing pushed along in shallow water, is the standard way of getting close to waterbirds.