Are You Ready for Extreme Birdwatching?

‘Listers’ documentary headed to Fresh Coast Film Festival in TC in May

Since the pandemic drove everyone outdoors, birdwatching (aka birding) has soared in popularity. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, birding has overtaken both hunting and fishing, as nearly a third of American adults—an estimated 96 million—scan the skies for our fleeting feathered friends.

With that many eyes ogling, a few are bound to cross and twitch. And those little aberrations in any widespread trend are often fertile ground for the quirky, the absurd, and the hilarious.

Enter southern Illinois brothers Owen and Quentin Reiser, who, on a whim, decided to pursue a documentary film about birding’s rather extreme offshoot, listing. If you didn’t know, there’s a species of birdwatcher called “listers” that tries (sometimes really hard) to spot as many different birds in a single year as they can, operating from coast to coast in the lower 48 states.

As the film reveals, these colorful characters maintain detailed statistics and other data, including photos, as they earnestly compete to see who can rack up the most personal sightings of as many species as possible.

Often hilarious, beautifully photographed, and packed with bird and human encounters that range from the mundane to the truly fascinating, Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching will appear at the Fresh Coast Film Festival at City Opera House in Traverse City this May.

A First Foray

We won’t give away too much of the story, but this two-hour film chronicles a year in which the Reiser brothers took an outsider’s look at this fringe phenomenon, a deep dive into a nest of fowl curiosity, if you will.

In their high-mileage Kia Sedona minivan, Owen and Quentin crisscrossed the nation in pursuit of their “Big Year” of bird discovery, documenting—listing!—as many new species as they could find.

In this process, the duo, who had no previous journalism, filmmaking, or birding experience, encounters and interviews some interesting characters, and they capture some very funny and strange moments among competitive people.

In spite of their inexperience in reporting, the Reiser brothers nevertheless do a good job pulling back the curtain on this unique offshoot of traditional bird watching. They offer a thorough, if not hilarious overview of the techniques and technologies listers use in their quirky quest.

Owen served as the film’s director, producer, editor, stop-motion animator, and primary videographer. Quentin, an app designer by day, handled the bird photography and joined interviews.

So how did they come to produce such a solid documentary, with no training or experience?
“[It’s] all just based on intuition,” Owen says, “just trying to make something funny that I wouldn’t mind watching myself.”

Soaring High

The spark of inspiration for the project came to Quentin one day while was blazing away with his bong and studying a field guide on North American birds. He pondered what it would be like to see every bird in the book, and, like a swan taking flight, the documentary idea rose high in his mind.

Do the Reiser brothers’ have a preferred weed strain or ingestion method? Is there a pungent green secret behind their success?

“What can you say?” says Owen. “The dispensary delivers. Quentin is definitely more of a pothead than I, but I don’t even think he knows the strains that well. There’s gotta be more species of weed than birds by now, no? Quentin will ingest weed by basically any means necessary. As for me, I’m more of a sensitive instrument. I tend to stick to the lower dose Sweet Tarts edibles.”

All About the Birds

A side project being developed parallel to the film was Quentin’s field guide to the over 500 different birds the brothers recorded in their Big Year. Throughout the filming Quentin made detailed studies of the birds, compiling them into a field guide published last August.

“At one point, [the guide] was the number two bestselling field guide in North America—pretty good for a book that has a bird with tits on the cover,” Owen explains. We found the Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States available at Barnes & Noble’s online store and a host of other online retailers.

Lately, the Reisers have been on another ornithological quest: attempting to lay eyes on the elusive (and perhaps extinct?) ivory-billed woodpecker. Owen said they’re hot on the trail of this almost mythical bird. And it sounds like another fascinating, off-center tale.

“There will hopefully be a film about it soon,” says Owen. “It’s a very controversial topic. We recently lived with a group of searchers who sold their collection of Mastodon bones to fund their 20-year search effort to try and rediscover the bird. It’s a very dense story.”

Flying to Fresh Coast

While viewers wait to see the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Listers will have a place of honor in the inaugural 2026 Fresh Coast Film Festival Traverse City April 30-May 3. Though several venues will serve as viewing spots, Listers will appear at City Opera House on Friday, May 1, at 7pm as part of the festival’s Friday night gala.

Fresh Coast Film Festival started in Marquette in 2016 with a heavy focus on outdoor recreation and conservation documentaries. This is the Traverse City installment’s first year, and local organizer (and Northern Express film columnist!) Joe Beyer says the L.P. edition will maintain the spirit and tradition of the Marquette event, offering lots of non-fiction and documentary selections, all of which appeared at Fresh Coast Marquette 2025 last October.

Listers certainly fits the FCFF’s genre, and Beyer said it was an easy choice for the Traverse City festival. When the brothers confirmed their attendance, Beyer said the local film festival’s stars aligned.

“When they said yes early, the rest of the program fell into place from there, and you’ll see the influence of the film across the event for good reason,” Beyer says. “This is a blue collar, brotherclucker of a movie, and I simply loved it!”

Listers is already a cult hit with over 3 million YouTube views and write-ups in major publications like Slate, The Atlantic, Audubon, and more. That’s some serious company, but not surprising, according to Beyer.

“Not only is Listers engaging, beautiful, and compelling as true documentary film,” he explains, “it’s also irreverent, hilarious, and unexpected, and is quite simply an adventure itself to go on. And it’s also made with grit and creativity by Midwest makers blazing their own trail as storytellers.”

Owen told Northern Express that he and Quentin are equally stoked to perch in Traverse City for a few days.

“Joe called me and sold me on [the film festival] really well,” he says. “We’ve been invited to do over 100 events or festivals,” he adds. “We’re super grateful for the offers, but we only said yes to two of them because it honestly just feels like we’re beating a dead horse a little bit. We'd rather just work on making the next project! With that said, we are stoked to be at Fresh Coast Film Festival!”

Spot Listers This May

Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching, will be shown at City Opera House on Friday, May 1, at 7pm as part of the Fresh Coast Film Festival in Traverse City. See the full festival schedule at freshcoastfilmtraversecity.ludus.com.

6pm: Doors open, live birds from North Sky Raptor Sanctuary will be featured along with an outreach table by the Grand Traverse Audubon Club

6:15-6:45pm: Reiser brothers book signing with National Writers Series

7pm: screening begins

9pm-12am: Listers-themed after party at Nocturnal Bloom Brewing (open to weekend and Friday day pass holders and special guests)

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