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Double crested Herons and "free" publicity



Screw-ups are the price of free publicity -- and I did contribute to this
one. But thanks, Harry, Josh and others who gave me the benefit of the
doubt! 

If you get the Wake edition of the News & Observer you may have seen the
picture of the double crested cormorants, identified as "herons,"
accompanying the article about the Chapel Hill Bird Club in the Tuesday
club-of-the-week feature. Mercifully, there was no picture in the Orange Co.
edition. (The sooty shearwater and black-capped petrel, which I wrote were
visitors to Jordan Lake during hurricane Fran, also were edited out of the
Orange edition. And the phone number to call about field trips was edited
out of both editions!)  

Someone from the N&O called me almost two months ago and asked if the Chapel
Hill Bird Club would want to be featured in the weekly series about local
clubs. Sure, I said -- good publicity. I wrote a story, then suggested to
the person at the N&O exactly how to get a good photo:  send a photographer
to Hwy. 751 bridge at Jordan Lake, I said, and there will be lots of
spectacular big white birds and a few big gray birds -- great egrets and
great blue herons. "Oh, just call them all 'herons' " I said, thinking that
would avoid any mislabeled birds. BIG mistake! This was in August, about
three weeks before hurricane Dennis flooded the lake. By the time the
photographer got out there, the mudflats must have been long gone and so he
shot the only birds he could find. The editor who wrote the caption probably
had a note saying a photo of "herons" would accompany the story. You know
the rest!

Well, gotta run.  I'm off to look for the "common crackle."

Cheers!

Ginger_Travis@unc.edu
Chapel Hill