Warning: Mini-rant coming!
I saw another one of the new Ask Jeeves TV ads last night. This one features a harried mother carrying a child as she wades into a wetland toward a bearded, bespectacled older man who is covered in cattail leaves and is wearing an Elmer Fudd hat with a mallard decoy on top of it. The woman says: "I need a recipe for lasagna." The man looks at her, then squats down in the cattails and blows a duck call. A voiceover says: "Don't ask a bird watcher for a recipe. Ask Jeeves."
Didn't anyone tell the Ask Jeeves marketing people that bird watchers do not fit the oddball, absent-minded professor stereotype anymore? This is far worse than the Folger's commercial of the 1980s where a couple, totally outfitted in safari gear, tiptoe deep into the woods where the woman whispers breathlessly to her husband: "There it IS honey! The red-winged blackbird! Now let's go have some crappy instant coffee!"
I thought we'd buried that Miss Jane Hathaway image of bird watchers long ago. I guess no one told the folks at Ask Jeeves. Perhaps they had no place reliable where they could get an answer to the question: What is today's bird watcher like? Or is it offensive, even slightly, to make fun of people pursuing a certain hobby?
Well they could have asked me or any one of the million or so other avid birder/bird watchers in North America. Call me hyper-sensitive, but birding is both my hobby and my profession and I've been a bird watcher for 35 years. I remember when bird watching was socially unacceptable and embarrassing. It's a huge relief not to have that stigma about our favorite activity.
I know one thing. The only question I'll be Asking Jeeves anytime soon is this:
Excuse me, Jeeves! Could you please shut up?
About Bill
- Bill of the Birds
- Bill Thompson III is the editor of Bird Watcher's Digest by day. He's also a keen birder, the author of many books, a dad, a field trip leader, an ecotourism consultant, a guitar player, the host of the "This Birding Life" podcast, a regular speaker/performer on the birding festival circuit, a gentleman farmer, and a fungi to be around. His North American life list is somewhere between 673 and 675. His favorite bird is the red-headed woodpecker. His "spark bird" was a snowy owl. He has watched birds in 25 countries and 44 states. But his favorite place to watch birds is on the 80-acre farm he shares with his wife, artist/writer Julie Zickefoose. Some kind person once called Bill "The Pied Piper of Birding" and he has been trying to live up to that moniker ever since.
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1 comments:
glad I found your blog- and I totally agree about the idiotic 'ask jeeves' commercial. Had they said 'don't ask a duck hunter' it would have made at least a bit of sense. I've been known to loose a shoe or two in swamps while birding, but I can't recall the last time I used a duck call ;)
good birding,
Cindy
http://www.danceswithmoths.com/blog/
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