I Still Believe in the Shape in the Trees

Lyrics

[Intro]
(night woods, a twig, nothing)
Cryptozoology. The study of animals that probably aren't there.

[Verse 1]
Let's be fair about this before we start being funny about it:
the okapi was a rumour. The mountain gorilla was a rumour.
The giant squid was sailors talking nonsense for four hundred years
until one washed up, and then it was zoology, and always had been.
The coelacanth was extinct for sixty-six million years
until a woman in a South African museum looked in a fishing boat.

[Chorus]
I still believe in the shape in the trees.
I know what that sounds like. I have heard how that sounds.
But the list of things that weren't there until they were
is longer than the list of people who admitted they were wrong.
I still believe in the shape in the trees.
Somebody studies this. Somebody has to be the one.

[Verse 2]
And then there's the rest of it — the hoaxes and the suits,
the blurry frame, the man who confessed on his deathbed,
the industry of it, the merchandise, the tour of the lake,
and the genuine harm when a fake takes the oxygen from the real,
because there are species going extinct undescribed, right now,
while the money and the cameras point at a shape in a lake.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
So what is the honest version of this? I think it's this:
the impulse is right and the method is usually terrible.
There ARE animals out there nobody has written down —
they are small, and dull, and in a canopy in Borneo,
and finding them takes twenty years and a grant and no drama,
and nobody makes a documentary about a new beetle.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the woods again)
Something moved.
Probably a deer. Probably. Almost certainly.