Always Bring Binoculars

The Hipster Face of Birding – 2025

Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching

Sometime in late August, folks started sharing a link to an online documentary about birding. By the middle of September, enthusiastic articles were appearing on Slate and elsewhere about the film. It is, without a doubt, a great watch. It’s informative, funny, and thought-provoking. Even if you can’t identify anything besides a pigeon, crow, sparrow, and seagull, you’ll enjoy Listers. And you’ll come away with an understanding of why some of us are so addicted to such a ridiculous activity.

The premise: two guys who don’t know anything about birds set out to see as many species as they can in the Lower 48 in a calendar year. The film follows their journey across America and into the world of birding. Along the way, they discuss the highs and lows of birding, the dos and don’ts and ethical dilemmas, and ponder the point of it all. In sneaky contrast to the low-quality footage of humans is some stunningly beautiful, high-definition video of birds.

The narrative frame for the film — a “big year” — becomes the thing about birding they like the least. The quote that begins the film (“Somewhere far down the slippery slope, we look back and realize how far we have come from the simple appreciation of birds”) is the film’s takeaway. It’s from Kenn Kaufman, birder extraordinaire who wrote the original tale of a Lower 48 Big Year in the wonderful book Kingbird Highway. I couldn’t agree more. Big Years are a selfish indulgent endeavor with a massive carbon footprint. 

But it’s also the paradox of birding. Growing the list gets us out there. But the list can’t be the reason we bird. 

The Hallmark Faces of Birding – 2025

Adventures in Love and Birding

In contrast to the hipster documentary centered on birding is a new birding-focused Hallmark movie. I can’t really say what it’s about because I haven’t seen it. It’s based on a book called Birding with Benefits that presumably replaces the actual benefits of birding (walking, being outdoors, and learning to care for our natural world) with the absurd idea that taking up birding could possibly lead to hooking up. According to the website, Adventures in Love & Birding is the story of a single mom who “agrees to be the partner of a bird enthusiast for a birding competition but misunderstands the assignment and tells everyone she’s his new girlfriend instead of just his teammate.” What follows, perhaps, are hijinks with binoculars and a moment in a forest while Varied Thrushes perch on our love-struck protagonists’ hands.  Are those Varied Thrushes kissing? I’ll never know.

The (funny white male) Hollywood Faces of Birding

Other Birding Movies

These aren’t the first birding movies that have been made. Among a dozen others, consider the following:

The Big Year – (2011) Starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson, this movie is a fictionalized story of a legendary Big Year birding battle. With 3 great actors as its leads, and a good chase story, it’s a fun movie to watch.

A Birder’s Guide to Everything – (2013)  Not all birding movies are about Big Years (thank god). This is about some teenagers who set out to find an extinct species of duck. This has actually happened. There’s even a project dedicated to finding bird species that haven’t been seen in at least a decade. Australia’s Night Parrot was rediscovered in 1990 after being thought extinct for a century. More recently the Black-naped pheasant-pigeon was documented (“by science”) for the first time since 1882 (not counting, of course, the local Papua New Guinea residents who were familiar with the bird). 

Birders  (2019) A nice 40-minute film about birding on both sides of the US-Mexico border in Texas.

The Birders: A Melodic Journey Through Northern Columbia – (2019) This movie takes you on a trip to Colombia to see the birds there. Colombia is a place I’d love to go birding. The country has over 1500 bird species. The movie-makers created a bird list for the movie, so you can watch the film and tick off all the species you see and here. which you can see here. 

Birders: The Central Park Effect – (2012) One of my great regrets is that I wasn’t a birder when I was living in New York City. I’ve had a couple of chances since to bird Central Park, but not during peak migration. And I lived blocks from Prospect Park in Brooklyn for years. This is a pleasant film about the magic of birding Central Park. One of the birders in the film is Chris Cooper, years before he lived through a racist incident while birding that went viral.

The Life of Birds – (1998) This is a 10-part BBC documentary with commentary from the legendary Sir David Attenborough.  If you can do without hipsters or A-list actors, and want the focus to be on the birds, you can’t get much better than this.