On Listing and Listers

I'll Never Do a Big Year

I Like birdwatching, but I don’t like it in the competitive sense… for me it takes a lot of fun out of it, cause I do love birdwatching now. It’s fun as fuck.

—Quentin Reiser

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Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m some holier-than-thou birding zen master who communes with birds while sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop in a meditative state. I know birders for whom it’s all about the bird in the moment, and I admire them for it. For me, that’s the hobby at its most pure, something to strive for, but I’m not there yet. Maybe someday I’ll be a bearded, berobed old man with a staff instead of a smartphone, not so much seeking birds but finding wisdom in them.

Or maybe not. Counting birds is fun.

Every fall, Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve becomes my main birding patch because of its proximity to our house and the wealth of migrating warblers it attracts. I went twice on Tuesday. In the morning, I was keen to count as many warblers as possible. I wanted a big list, a dozen warblers at minimum, ideally 18 or more. A side helping of vireos too, please.

That’s where my brain was. I had my camera handy in the event a rarity showed up, but I wasn’t there to leisurely snap photos and take it all in. I was fixated on getting my binoculars on and IDing every one of those twitchy little bastards as they gleaned insects in the foliage. I didn’t get 18 warblers. Or a dozen. In the end, I entered a mere 7 into eBird.

Later that day I returned with a totally different vibe. My listing switch was off. Instead, I was getting my steps and taking my time with the few warblers I encountered. I was stopping to get photos when the birds would humor me, like this immature female American Redstart, the furthest thing from a rarity but a delight to pass the time with nonetheless.

All this to say—I’m not a birding monk, nor am I a lister. I’m somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, though where on the spectrum I find myself depends on the time of year, the day, even the hour I’m birding. I do like listing and the thrill that comes with piling up a big checklist. I’ve blathered ad nauseam about the jolt that comes with adding a new life bird, yard bird, county bird, blah, blah, blah.

But the idea of extreme listing? Doing a Big Year, capital B, capital Y? Seeing as many birds as I can between January 1 and December 31? Not interested. I’ll leave extreme listing up to competitive birders and upstanding young maniacs like Quentin and Owen Reiser, who recently dropped the raunchy, profane, shockingly good documentary Listers, an autobiographical tale of stoner-brothers/fledgling birders who set out on a mad quest to see as many birds in the lower 48 states as possible in a calendar year.

Spurred by weed, an old family copy of Birds of North America, and a wild notion (could they somehow see every bird in that Golden guide?), the brothers embark on a hero’s quest equipped with a couple of cameras, a Kia Sedona that served as transportation and lodging, an outdated field guide, little money, no knowledge of eBird or rare-bird alerts, and a surfeit of ignorance-driven gumption.

They had no idea what they were doing. No idea what they were in for. But they went balls out, careening across the country, meeting birders (and other colorful characters), and learning on the fly as they drove their beater of a minivan to within an inch of its life.

Have I sold it? Trust me it’s a romp, and you can watch their adventure ad-free on YouTube!

From a pure filmmaking point of view, Listers is extremely well made. The storytelling, camera work, editing, graphics—top to bottom this is remarkable craftsmanship by younger brother Owen, who directed, shot, and edited their footage into a layered, captivating work. Owen Reiser does know what he’s doing when it comes to content production, and at every turn he displays a real knack for using a (presumably) tiny budget to his advantage, right down to the crude, hilarious stop-motion animations.

As for the birding, he describes his film as A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching. I don’t think that subtitle does his work justice. This is no glimpse but a deep dive into birding culture and the rigors of doing a Big Year.

The brothers bring an uncensored, often scatological attitude to the hobby (I just got the Becard, Quentin’s taking a shit, Owen pronounces). They sometimes subtly but mostly not-so-subtly poke fun at everything about birding and birders as their voyage of discovery exposes them to all the minutiae of the birding world, from the art of describing a bird’s location (Just to the right of the wiffleball, one brother instructs another), the lengths to which birders will go to see a bird (at one point constructing boats trying to see a bittern), and the rabid, sometimes petty competitiveness that goes into setting Big Year records (It gets easier every year, one former recordholder laments).

Having experienced birding’s stuffy, self-serious side, I welcome the Reisers’ irreverence, though never do I sense it veering into meanness or ridicule. Always I detect a reverence lurking behind the irreverence. Lifer! New Liferrr!, Quentin mocks early, chiding the joy birders get from seeing a bird for the first time, but along the way you can see the snark giving way to wonder as the birds become captivating. As their steam for listing wanes and the desire to just chill with the birds waxes, the journey transforms from of one of experience to one of enlightenment.

But all that enlightenment comes with a cost.

Haven’t showered in ten days. Smell like a sewer. Mosquitoes are eating my ass.

—Quentin Reiser

At no point do they attempt to paint a Big Year as glamorous, especially minivan life. There are temperature and weather extremes, interminable hikes, interminable drives, tedium, bugs, sickness, fatigue, burnout bordering on despair, and questionable hygiene. Where humor fueled them at the beginning, at certain points it seemed a last line of defense.

At two hours, Listers isn’t a short movie. Documentaries tend to clock in at 90 minutes, but the brothers cram a lot of topics in there. More than a chronicle of their quest, Listers is an analysis of the hobby through the eyes of determined beginners. Some of the subjects they grapple with are:

• The polarizing decision to remove honorifics from bird names. Watch one veteran birder’s brain glitch out in real time as a fit of apoplexy seizes him.

• The use of playback (blasting birdsong from an electronic device) to attract birds you can’t find. Bad maybe, but that much worse than the more accepted practice of imitating bird songs and calls with our voices?

• The frustration that comes with repeatedly trying and failing to see a bird. See a nemesis bird born before our very eyes!

• The horror of plummeting bird populations due to development and habitat loss.

• The way nature and birds are ready to spring back with a little help from the humans who destroyed it in the first place.

They could have left all that out. They could have made it merely about the birds and their count, but their determination to fully grasp the hobby and its practitioners leaves us with a richer product. I could have easily watched another hour.

Spoiler alert! Skip the following passage if you want to see for yourself how their Big Year plays out.

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The brothers saw 579 bird species during their Big Year, far short of the record but incredibly impressive for rank novices who had never heard of eBird when they began. That’s five more species than I’ve seen in my life and 224 more than I’ve seen in the US.

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I have trouble finding anything to criticize about Listers, but I was left wondering if at any point the brothers, who shared excruciatingly tight quarters for a year, ever felt the need to murder each other.

Glad they survived their year.

I can’t imagine Listers inspiring anyone to do a Big Year (though I’m sure it will). For me, it only reinforced one of my biggest bucket list dreams—to NEVER do a Big Year. Yet for all the misery portrayed on screen, there’s still a lot of devil-may-care romance to the Reiser’s adventure. They did something big and bold, something that made me think about what kind of birder I am and want to be.

That they saw a shit ton of birds almost seems beside the point.

The birds are cool though. Alway are.

Final note—I appreciate Quentin Reiser’s moustache and the way moustaches have proliferated among his generation. Truly my heart warms at the way the moustache has been reclaimed by reputable folk, and it matters not at all that my brother Jeff and I will receive no credit (however richly deserved) for resurrecting the unironic moustache when we formed the Northern Ohio Moustache League in 2006.

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We just heard a bird click from the grass, and that’s, you know, that’s like a huge deal in this community, to hear a small, shy bird in the grass go “click-click-click-click-click” for just five seconds.

—Quentin Reiser

Featured Photo—American Redstart

I observed this and about four other American Redstarts during my second vistit to Beechwood on Tuesday. They put on a show, often picking gnats from this branch that spans a birdbath. Not once did they drop down for a drink, though they made it as close as the basin’s rim. Based on the orange-ish tint on its side, this looks like an immature male.

Featured Video—American Redstart

Please enjoy one last Redstart, and take a moment of silence for her delicious victims.

10/10 Recommends

Listers

Owen and Quentin Reiser saw so many birds and got so much footage of birds, some of it breathtaking, that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’ve been avid birders since Kindergarten. But setting aside the suspicion I was watching a mockumentary, Listers is endlessly fun (fun as fuck, even), hilarious from beginning to end, and most importantly a call to take the hobby less seriously and the birds more seriously.

logicalpicture

When it comes to the birding spectrum, my friend Chris is about as close to the monk end as it gets—in love with every bird he encounters, uninterested in lists or eBird or any of the trappings that turn a pasttime into a sport. He’s also an beautiful photographer who’s taken some fine American Redstart photos of his own and is well worth a follow.

Living with Nature

In my wife Alex’s latest video, experience what it’s like to let nature come and go as it pleases in a wide-open home in Uvita, Costa Rica.

That’s all for this week. Have you seen Listers? Have you ever done a Big Year? Do you want to? Have you taken extended trips with family? How did that go? Let’s talk all about it down below👇

Until next time, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to list your ass off!

nwb

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This post was human generated. All media by Nathaniel Bowler, except where noted. Developmental edits by Alexandra Hidalgo.