The Press and the Lord God Bird

by Rick Musser
Professor of Journalism

The ivory-billed woodpecker is the ultimate critter story.

We teach this sort of stuff to juniors in journalism school. Turn on your TV. The critter genre is a stock story for several networks. It even has its own cable channel. Human beings just seem hardwired for animal stories. It's a story form that goes back even further than the cave paintings at Lascaux — a form somehow embedded in the human tribe's collective unconscious.

Critter stories need just two things: a critter and a news angle. The more the critter touches our emotions — the more it scares us, or charms us, or awes us — the less important the news angle.

And, Lord, this bird has star power. The author of one of several books about this awe-inspiring Picoides calls the ivory bill the "Lord God bird," as in: "Lord God, look at that bird!" The author who chronicles the latest search for the long-sought-after ivory bill uses the ornithological alias "Grail Bird." Or, as the Cornell Ornithology Lab blurb describes it, the "ghost bird of the swamp. Big, beautiful, iconic, and mysterious."

And a news peg? Well, "Bird long thought extinct found in Arkansas swamp" does have roughly the same headline impact as "Elvis found alive in Arkansas swamp."

Combine the strength of these critter story elements — awe-inspiring celebrity and astonishing news impact — and you get the perfect media storm.

A star with the power of the ivory-billed woodpecker can play many roles in many media story lines, giving the media storm staying power. Reporters can write more than the deep-in-the-swamp-a-mysterious-bird-survives story. Reporters who have neither the time, nor the wardrobe, to paddle a kayak can spin stories from the pavement about folksy, rural locals hoping to make a buck with woodpecker T-shirts. Environmental reporters can spin the story of habitat protection. Right wing bloggers can concoct tree hugger conspiracies to turn the ivory bill into another spotted owl threat to income and property rights.

And then there is the detective story.

The hunt for the ivory bill has for years tiptoed around the edges of cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, real and imagined. Log onto cryptozoology.com and you'll find The Grail Bird featured along with Big Foot books.

And therein lies the secret power behind the search for the Lord God Bird. The story shows us that science was wrong. Our imagination, our hopes and our fears about things that go bump in the night might be right, and the experts of the animal kingdom just might be wrong.

If you log onto Cornell's Ornithology Lab site, you can see that point writ large:

"The bird has been sought for decades by those trying to determine whether the remarkable species still exists," the blurb for the book explains. "Their findings have been met with ridicule and scorn; since the early twentieth century, most of the scientific world has believed that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is extinct.

"But when author Tim Gallagher set out to write THE GRAIL BIRD, he mounted his own quest for the elusive bird and discovered the amazing truth:

"The Ivory-billed Woodpecker lives!"

Or did it?

The next round of news, news repeated 100 hits deep into 197 ivory-billed woodpecker links on a recent Google news search, noted that some scientists still disputed the bird's existence.

And that brings us to one, last basic journalism school lesson: A story with a good conflict story trumps a story with a good critter — every time. And a critter story with conflict? Well, that gets you on page one of the New York Times. And that's where this ultimate critter story has landed.