Life comes at you fast: On Monday, I was not at all interested in birdwatching. On Tuesday, I was obsessed with it for two straight hours. I am probably not the first person to tell you that you should, as soon as you can spare one hour and 59 minutes, watch the film Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching.
Someone sent me a link to it on August 29th, 10 days after it went live on YouTube (thanks, Jason), followed by four or five other people. By the time I got around to watching the first 20 minutes of it, I was so taken with it that I thought “surely someone’s written about this.” And yes, Slate had written an article about it, as had the folks at GearJunkie. In the first month after it was released, it had 1.1 million views on YouTube. So what makes it so good?
The story: Two brothers from St. Louis—who are very novice birdwatchers—take one 2010 Kia Sedona minivan and one year to attempt a “Big Year,” the birding term for a person trying to identify as many birds as possible, by sight or sound, in a geographic area in the span of one calendar year.
Two minutes into the film, Quentin Reiser, sitting in front of the camera, explains the genesis of the adventure: “One day I got high and found the family’s bird guide book. And I thought about how crazy it would be if you knew all the birds in that book. Just how insane that is.”
As he’s saying those three sentences, his younger brother, cinematographer Owen Reiser, pans the camera down a bong to show it sitting on top of a copy of Birds of North America: A Guide to Field Identification.
Quentin and Owen come off as two regular guys with almost zero knowledge of birding (which they are) but they also obviously worked really, really hard on this film—which is, by the way, free to watch on YouTube (because Owen has not turned on ads for it). Owen is a legit professional cinematographer who has shot documentary footage for National Geographic and others, and brings that production quality to the video footage of birds in the film. But he also had a vision for the aesthetic of the film (I believe), and almost everything else in the film is vérité, with hand-built animations and graphics—which makes the film feel more authentic to the experience of eating-rice-and-beans while living out of a 2010 Kia Sedona with your brother, camping in Cracker Barrel parking lots.
Quentin is very comfortable in front of his younger brother’s camera and dropping profane wisdom during the sit-down interviews (“Dude, holy fuck mosquitoes love to be inside your van”), or living the adventure in real time in the field, like when he’s enthusiastically snapping photos of a Montezuma Quail in Arizona in March, and he quietly announces, “I’d run through a brick wall for that bird.”
The brothers find their way into the birdwatching community (and interview many of its more accomplished birders), explain everything they learned about birdwatching to the rest of us non-experts, do it in their own style, don’t gloss over the uncomfortable parts (the mosquitoes, the heat, the negative side of competing to identify more birds than anyone else, the discomfort of living in a very small old minivan), but capture the joy of discovery and adventure, and will make you laugh out loud (I promise).
Maybe what works best about the whole thing is that it’s fun. These two are clearly fun to be around, enjoy being fun, and even though they’re dedicated to this obsessive quest that definitely changed their lives, it almost always feels light. If you take a second to examine the graphics and animations, you can imagine Owen having fun creating them, dedicating an hour (or hours) to something that he knows will be on the screen for only a handful of seconds. These two are real artists who have made a Very Fun Thing, and many of us probably need that kind of fun right now.
The film is free, but you can support it or say thanks through Owen’s Venmo or by buying the book Quentin and Owen made about the trip on Bookshop or Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
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