Every once in a while a phenomenon in birding transcends its niche and achieves its highest possible level of notoriety: your non-birder relatives start texting you about it. The most recent topic to reach this status is the Reiser brother’s big year documentary Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching. It’s a well-made, creatively-edited, and largely well-researched documentary, and as of writing this it sits at nearly two million views on youtube. The film’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive from birders and nonbirders alike, but it makes some serious mistakes that threaten the integrity of birding culture.
Even before he speaks, Quinten Reiser’s first appearance in the film tells us this is NOT your grandma’s birding documentary. To remain committed to the mullet and mustache look in 2025 is in a way more impressive than to have jumped ship a few years ago when the zeitgeist began to sour on it. Rocking the style these days announces, “I know I look like a TikTok caricature but I don’t care,” which is significantly braver than moving on to the more up-to-date matcha and tote bag look, and almost as brave as ignoring such trends in the first place. Add to Quinten’s picture a timbre and cadence of speech that is so laidback it borders on vocal fry, and what we end up with is unequivocal: birding is finally getting the trendy, gen-z, ironically-detached treatment it’s been waiting for. Our little hobby will be pried from the cold dead grip it’s been languishing in and launched headlong into youthful freedom. But is that really such a good thing?
The cracks begin to show early in the film when they introduce Ebird, a popular website for reporting and viewing bird sightings from around the world. Their first experience with an Ebird reviewer, a volunteer who monitors the Ebird database for mistakes, comes after they misreport a Red-shouldered Hawk as a Golden Eagle. The reviewer who politely corrects them is referred to dismissively as an “Ebird cop.” Later on when their erroneous Gray Flycatcher sighting is corrected by a different reviewer, Quinten announces sarcastically, “thank you guys for being so on our fucking dick about bird ID’s, I super appreciate it,” as if it’s such a pain to be held to even the most basic standard of accuracy. At another point, he refers to the well-established convention of including as much detail in the reporting of rare bird sightings as possible with smug disbelief: “You’ll see people describing a bird with sometimes full paragraphs, they describe it like it’s a huge scientific finding.”
Their biggest sin comes around the 35 minute mark, when they introduce “swallow-gate,” North American birding’s most infamous cheating scandal. For the uninitiated, the story centers on a talented young birder from North Carolina who started reporting dubious sightings, many of which went uncorroborated. After reporting a state first Violet-Green Swallow and attaching a picture as proof, other birders became suspicious, checked the photo’s metadata, and realized it had been taken months earlier in the west coast, where the bird is common. Just about as cut and dry as it gets when it comes to cheating. It’s a story that has been told to death, but the Reiser brother’s novelty was that they managed to interview the perpetrator. They introduce him anonymously and boldly with the claim, “he’s actually kind of the man, and I’m convinced he really saw the bird.” Incredible investigative journalism is on display as the cheater proceeds to trot out some utter nonsense in defense of his behavior without any pushback from Owen. He laments that the high-pressure world of birding was too much for him, and he was at once so excited about finding this massive rarity and anxiety-ridden about having to prove it that he caved to the pressure and used a picture of a different bird. On its face an unlikely story, besides the obvious point that it’s still unethical, but apparently it was enough to convince the Reiser’s (Woodward and Bernstein, I like to call them). To add insult to injury, in an interview in the following scene, Owen has the nerve to ask a record committee member who presided over the ordeal, “is it a funny story to you yet? It’s all kind of ridiculous, right?” To which the committee member, with much more composure than I would’ve mustered in his place, gives a measured and obvious response about how without the honor system, the whole hobby falls apart.
The flippancy that defines their approach to these issues is based on a naive and superficial “us-vs-them” mentality. It’s clear the Reiser’s haven’t given it much thought, but the position they’ve landed on is that they are young and hip and know that birding is nothing more than a bit of a joke. In their minds, they are righteously taking on birding’s overly serious gatekeepers. I wouldn’t be shocked if they were so quick to lump the swallow-gate cheater into their in-group simply because he is also young and tuned into their Zoom interview with a “badass” profile picture holding a big venomous snake. The record committee member on the other hand, with his gray hair, glasses, and monotone voice, interviewed with a professorial backdrop of a bookshelf-lined study, and didn’t stand a chance. This is the fundamental and shallow dichotomy that makes Listers so frustrating to watch.
Of course there are many aspects of birding that are pretty silly, and there is nothing inherently wrong with making fun of them. The problem is aside from the elements of silliness, birding is also fundamentally a giant citizen science project, deserving of all the rigors and guardrails that come naturally to the rest of science. Ebird is not, as the film is so eager to make it out to be, just a place for neurotic, hyper-obsessed listers to fan their egos, it is also a massively valuable resource fueling research on bird movements, population trends, and conservation. The many reviewers and record committee members who volunteer tirelessly all over the world to maintain the integrity of this resource do so not out of some self-satisfying impulse to nag, but in order to uphold scientific values. To treat their hard work with such adolescent disdain is not only quite rude, it also risks tainting the whole enterprise.
Besides these concrete issues, a subtler one remains. Birding has always been a rare bastion of sincerity in this increasingly detached world. There is very little clout to chase in birding, since most of the time, no one really cares what we’re up to. The only reason to get involved is to pursue a real connection with nature. The Reiser’s stale, ironic approach in this film may have attracted a lot of trendy interest, but in my view it is antithetical to the heart and soul of the hobby. Birding has always been about the “doing” rather than the “being seen,” and Listers is an attempt to invert that and drag our hobby into the vacuum of middle-of-the-road, easily-accessible mediocrity that so much of modern culture has already succumbed to. “Gatekeeping” is almost always interpreted negatively, but birding absolutely needs *some* gatekeeping. At the very least we need the kind that will maintain birding’s scientific integrity, and is it really too much, on top of that, to expect that to call oneself a “birder,” one should at least be curious about the difference between a Golden Eagle and a Red-shouldered Hawk? Birding is for everyone, and focusing on welcoming as many people as possible into the fold is admirable, but not if it undermines the integrity and sincerity that make the hobby so special.
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