Lifestyles

Of a Feather: The avian face of advertising

By BILL CHAISSON
By Bill Chaisson

This past Wednesday near the Music Hill trailhead of the Sunapee-Ragged-Kearsarge Trail, I listened to a yellow-billed cuckoo calling. I had heard its distinctive, repeated kowp back in June, but hadn’t been sure of the identity of the caller. I went online to the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology to see if it was the black-billed or the yellow-billed. So, this time I was ready. I didn’t go looking for it, because it was off the trail on private property, but also because cuckoos are hard to find. They are secretive and have the tendency to sit very, very still for long periods of time.

This habit of being retired and sitting still is at complete variance with the message of the decades-old advertising campaign for General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs. Since 1962, the mascot for this breakfast cereal has been Sonny the Cuckoo. Aside from having a yellow bill, Sonny does not resemble an actual cuckoo. His catchphrase “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” is invariably uttered immediately before he loses all restraint and goes berserk at the mere sight of his favorite cereal.

Sonny’s behavior is more a reference to a cuckoo clock than the bird itself. Male European cuckoos (Cuculus canorus) make their goo-koo call continuously at all hours of the day and night, which some listeners find quite irritating. But someone in southern Germany decided to recreate the sound with tiny organ pipes inside a clock that has a bird emerge from a door and announce every hour and half-hour.

The other breakfast cereal with a bird mascot is Kellogg’s Froot Loops. When first introduced in 1963 the cereal was dyed red, orange and yellow. More flavors were added in the 1990s, but the colors of Toucan Sam’s bill still correspond to the original three dyes. The advertising suggests the colors correspond to different flavors, but in fact they are all infused with the same fruit blend.

Many toucan species do have brightly colored bills, but none of them are banded like Sam’s. The cartoon most closely resembles a keel-billed toucan, although its bill is green, blue, yellow, and maroon. Ramphastos sulfuratus is the national bird of Belize, the former British Honduras, but it is probably a coincidence that Sam has a British accent.

Sam’s catchphrase “Follow my nose! It always knows!” refers to his ability to locate Froot Loops from a great distance. While toucans do eat mostly fruit — a wide range of different fruits — they are not known to find it by following its scent.

Dove soap was invented by Vincent Lamberti, a chemist for Lever Brothers in the 1950s. Lamberti came up with a process to replace fatty acids derived from plants or animals with an inexpensive synthetic compound. The resulting soap was less irritating to the skin.

Doves are, of course, a symbol of peace, perhaps because of the soothing nature of their coo. Our own mourning dove seems on the face of it to be a gentle soul. In fact, they are, like all members of the family, prone to fierce conflicts during the breeding season.

In English the smaller species tend to be called doves and the larger pigeons, but this is not consistently applied. The collective noun for a group of pigeons or doves is a “dule,” derived from the French word for mourning, which conveys a certain vulnerability. Given this widespread vernacular perception of gentleness, Lamberti can’t really be blamed for naming his soap after a supposedly docile bird.

The logo for Dove soap is a highly stylized illustration of a bird in flight, which is how doves are almost always rendered. On the packaging the dove symbol is gold, but as the soap is white, the imprint of the bird on the bar is also. Most people unfamiliar with the wild birds, think of all doves as white.

Bluebirds are another species onto which we have projected a distinct personality. Their song is a slurred, subdued variation of a robin’s and is often represented as cheerily, cheer-up etc. While they sound harmless enough, they are in fact rather fierce, often defending their territories by attacking intruders, pulling out feathers and beating them with their wings. Other bluebirds receive this treatment, but so do many species that try to steal bluebird nesting sites.

Bluebird brand orange juice sells their product with birds almost as stylized as the dove on the soap bar. These bluebirds have white bellies and blue backs, wings and tails, which does roughly correspond with the appearance of the eastern bluebird. But Sialia sialis has a brick-red chest and doesn’t have a white face. Nor do bluebirds wear bonnets or eye glasses.

On Bluebird brand labels the mother and father birds are depicted as making the juice while a baby bird urges them on from the sidelines. While bluebirds are found in Florida, where oranges are grown, they aren’t likely to live (or be employed) in the groves. Once associated with apple orchards because they nested in the hollow limbs, modern pruning techniques have left bluebirds homeless in commercial fruit-producing landscapes. Pesticide application also cuts down on the number of insects available as well.

In sum, when you spot birds in advertising, their use almost invariably has an anthropological rather than ornithological basis. Marketing almost never teaches us anything. Rather, it confirms our prejudices, and our prejudices are produced by sending nature through the distorting lens of our culture. Once upon a time, ethnic stereotypes were used much the same way in advertising, but that has been steadily eroded by progressive thinking. People are affected by how they are represented in advertising. Happily, I feel sure that birds are not.

Bill Chaisson, who has been a birdwatcher since age 11, is a former editor of the Eagle Times. He now works for the Town of Wilmot and lives in Sutton.

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