When the Cosco Busan oil spill hit San Francisco Bay back in 2007, we issued a lot of press releases in an effort to make people aware of the severity of the risk to birds in this Globally Significant Important Bird Area. One of these releases was entitled “Story of San Francisco Bay oil spill written in impacts on birds.” It wasn’t the kind of press release you issue to get someone to write a story, but rather the kind you want to make reporters think about an incident in a new way. In this case, we were trying to alert people to the fact that birds had really become the center of the story. If you wanted to dramatize how bad that spill was, you had to detail it in the number of birds that had died. If you wanted to illustrate the story, seemingly it could only be done with photos or video of dead or dying birds.

For about a year now, Audubon California has been using the tagline “Birds Matter.” Again, we’re doing this to compel people to recognize that, for a variety of reasons, birds are important to us. Birds are one of the few forms of wildlife that most of us encounter every day, but we can all find ourselves taking them for granted. That is, until something like an oil spill happens. And then a photo on the cover of a newspaper of a bird covered with oil and struggling to survive can strike a startling emotional chord within us.

It happened again early this month with the more recent, and thankfully smaller, oil spill in San Francisco Bay. As word about the spill spread throughout the news media, talk quickly shifted to the number of birds that had been affected. Even after the story had fallen off the front page, the follow-up stories were all about the number of dead birds being found. As with Cosco Busan, the story of this oil spill was written in images of birds.

This isn’t anything new. One of our colleagues at Audubon California is a former Alaska news reporter who covered the infamous Exxon Valdez spill. She tells us that the story of the Exxon Valdez quickly became a story in large part about birds – the number dead, the number being rescued, the potential future impacts, etc.

One hears a lot of talk about how birds are indicators of environmental health, that they’re literally the “canary in the coalmine.” And we all seem to know instinctively know that if something is bad for birds, it’s bad for us. But it goes deeper than that, and that’s why reporters know that they have to tell the story of birds when they cover these incidents.

Put simply, birds matter.