Coincidentally Canberra photographer David Flannery, whose close-up portraits of gang-gang cockatoos of both sexes graced this column last week, was in Sydney last weekend and after seeing Wednesday's column has contacted us, saying ''I can trump your one tawny frogmouth with two!! I took this photograph on Saturday, albeit in Sydney's leafy north shore suburb of Gordon, in a tree in a backyard backing onto the national park.''

Last Wednesday's lovely frogmouth picture has been very, very popular with readers. Ours really is a bird-besotted city. We've even had readers' thank-you messages about it, an experience almost unknown to columnists in this city where people seldom write on impulse except to gloat that - gotcha! - they've found a misplaced apostrophe in your work or that you've made a spelling mistake in the name of the pet budgie of the niece of the aromatherapist of the mayoress of Reykjavik.

But back to Wednesday's picture. It is so lovely and popular that if the chap who photographed it in his Queanbeyan garden wasn't so shy and retiring - he's refused to give even us his address for fear twitchers will come around and scare the frogmouths away - he could, with that picture, make a fortune from frogmouth merchandise. Who wouldn't want a frogmouth T-shirt?

Garry Wilson, has sent a photograph he's taken of a frogmouth in a tree, using its legendary camouflage so effectively that even knowing it must be there somewhere, you struggle to find it. It took me five minutes. We'd publish it here but, due to the species' eerie powers of camouflage, it just looks like a picture of yet another tree trunk.

There are frogmouths galore in our part of the world but it's no wonder we seldom see them.

Wilson's unpublishable picture perfectly illustrates the report in the bird Bible Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds that frogmouths ''When disturbed, adopt characteristic Stick Posture, sitting stiffly, with body stretched up at an angle to supporting branch, plumage sleeked, tail held lengthways along branch, and eyes narrowed to slits, all the while keeping the intruder under close observation.''

Organisers of the August 15 to 18 Civic Square Winter Bed Vigil had promised that ''John Lennon and Yoko Ono'' would be among the celebrity occupiers of the bed, in a reprise of their famous 1969 honeymoon ''bed-in'' for peace in the Amsterdam Hilton.

At first sight the John and the Yoko seen in the bed were so eerily like the real thing, we imagined some mystic feat of channelling.

But then the presence of Robyn Archer (not there in Amsterdam in 1969) gave away that this was after all a staged occasion. John Lennon and Yoko were played by Dom Lavers and Gill Gray respectively, both wearing authentic 1969 pyjamas.

The Winter Bed Vigil was a Centenary of Canberra event to raise awareness of the plight of Canberra's homeless.

Winter is petering out apace and those of us who prayed for our city to receive the centenary gift of a flattering dusting of snow appear to have prayed in vain.

With fingers still crossed and to remind us of how it used to snow here, in the olden days, here from the National Archives of Australia is an atmospheric 1965 photograph. It was taken for the Australian News and Information Bureau by John Crowther when our climate was more alpine.