Birding is having something of a pop-culture moment. Uzo Aduba’s “world’s greatest detective,” from this summer’s Netflix hit The Residence, was a birder, as is Mark Ruffalo’s FBI agent character in the new HBO drama Task. It’s almost as if the pandemic-era surge in birding has finally worked its way through the writers room and onto the screen.
But the best birding media of 2025 isn’t on a streaming service. It’s available for free, without ads, on YouTube. There, a documentary made by two hilarious young Midwestern brothers has become the most talked-about birding movie in ages, and is putting a whole new side of the hobby on screen. Even better, it’s finding fans even among non-birders: One of the video’s top comments, with more than 2,000 likes, reads, “You didn’t start your day thinking you would watch a documentary about birdwatching. None of us did. It’s that good.”
Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching follows Quentin and Owen Reiser’s 2024 attempt to set the Lower 48 Big Year record—that is, to observe and identify the most wild bird species in a single calendar year. The odds are, it’s fair to say, not in their favor: They are complete novices with no money and no idea how to identify birds. They “planned” their route by Googling “what states have the most birds” and then just headed south. They didn’t even have binoculars.
The resulting documentary and accompanying book, Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States, chronicles the brothers’ rapid descent into the dark and cringy heart of birding. They meet the kinds of geriatric, cargo-pants-and-sun-hat birders found loitering around birding spots across the country. They interview ridiculous, self-important “listers,” both young and old, who’ll jet off across the country the moment a rare bird is reported just to add one more check mark to their tally. They cover bird-world scandals and other “What exactly is this hobby?” topics.
But that stuff, frankly, is a distraction from the amusing and innovative heart of their story: two young dudes driving around the real but hidden “natural” America. It turns out that birding is a natural subject for a road movie.
Though it rarely makes the book-club circles, the American birding travelogue is a surprisingly robust literary genre. It dates back to at least 1831, when the first volume of John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography tantalized European readers with tales of the American frontier and its novel wildlife. Many other titles have followed, from revered naturalists like Roger Tory Peterson (Wild America: The Record of a 30,000 Mile Journey Around the Continent); competitive listers like Neil Hayward (Lost Among the Birds) and James Vardaman (Call Collect, Ask for Birdman); and bona fide journalists like Mark Obmascik (whose 2004 The Big Year was later turned into a movie starring Jack Black, Owen Wilson, and Steve Martin).
The genre has always been at its best when it forgets about the birds and focuses on the road. Kenn Kaufman’s 1997 Kingbird Highway is generally recognized as the pinnacle of the form, chronicling the author’s Big Year attempt in 1973, when he was a teenager. The birds are great, but the true joy in the book is the adventure: The weirdos who gave him rides as he thumbed along the interstates, the girls he met, and the things he had to do to scrape by on his travels. I’ve hung out with Kenn, and believe me: Few people ask him about the birds he saw on that trip, but lots of people ask him what cat food tasted like.
The Reiser brothers are at their best when they’re depicting the realities of American nature. The pristine landscapes of Audubon’s day have been replaced by neglected public lands, strewn with trash and bordered by chain restaurants. While on the road, the brothers encounter apparent Subway parking-lot “drug deals,” a dead dog in a trash bag, and some of the worst public toilets imaginable. Instead of sleeping out under the stars, they usually find themselves in a Cracker Barrel parking lot, one of the few remaining places that generally offers free overnight parking.
But here’s the thing: That’s what birding is. What many other birders and I love about Listers and the accompanying field guide (which includes dozens of QR codes linking to short YouTube videos) is that it’s the first time we’ve seen “real” birding on screen. This is the birding of gas stations, ponds behind a women’s prison, and “the bird’s right there on the mud next to the Wiffle ball and the tire.” It’d be depressing if birders weren’t so used to it.
Those shots give the documentary a journalistic edge that evokes the work of Andrew Callaghan, of the popular YouTube series Channel 5 and All Gas No Brakes, but Listers is saved from being a slog because the brothers are so damn funny. They have the kind of easygoing, infectious, and filthy banter that only exists between two siblings on a road trip, and the most enjoyable parts of the documentary (and the Instagram account they used to document their journey as it happened) are the times when they’re just hanging out in their minivan. Quentin, with his mullet and drawl, is a natural in front of the camera, and Owen (a professional wildlife videographer with credits on National Geographic’s America the Beautiful series, among others) balances the grainy handycam footage of the moments when the brothers are most beaten down with truly gorgeous, high-definition video of the birds they’ve found. There’s even a bit of Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled gonzo journalism thrown in: The brothers’ whole birding saga is inspired in part by the fact that one of them happened to pick up a field guide while high on weed, and at one point, they’re somewhere on the Pacific, on the edge of Half Moon Bay, when the drugs begin to take hold.
Did they set the Lower 48 Big Year record? No, not by a long shot. But with their instant cult-classic documentary, they found another way to go down in the birding history books.