Get to Know the Brothers Behind the Buzziest Birding Film in Years

Like a vagrant species in a neighborhood park, the documentary Listers recently appeared out of nowhere and caused an immediate buzz among birders.

The feature-length film, available for free on YouTube, follows director Owen Reiser and his brother Quentin on their 2024 attempt to break the Big Year record for the Lower 48 by seeing well over 700 bird species. The catch? The brothers know nothing about birds or how to find them.

The result is an irreverent, hilarious, and wildly entertaining road-trip adventure. The film manages to simultaneously lampoon “listers” who seem more focused on birding as a competition than on the birds themselves, and celebrate, from an outsider perspective, the beauty of birds and the excitement of spotting them in the wild. The Reisers pursued their goal with a refreshing DIY ethos, not by jetting across the country to log rarities, but by traveling on the cheap and sleeping in Cracker Barrel parking lots in a 2010 Kia Sedona they bought for $4,500.

A recent Slate piece called Listers “the most talked-about birding movie in ages,” and noted that even viewers who have never picked up binoculars, too, are raving about the film. It has been viewed more than one million times since the Reisers released it just a month ago. The brothers also recently published a field guide—maybe we’d better make that “field guide”—to all the birds they saw along the way.

When Audubon caught up with the brothers recently, Owen, who works as a cinematographer, was at home in St. Louis, while Quentin, an app designer, called in from the Sedona, which was parked somewhere in Wenatchee, Washington. The text below was edited for length and clarity.

Audubon: The documentary offers a pretty breezy explanation for how this whole thing got started, involving Quentin smoking weed and marveling at a bird guide book. It seems like a lot would have to happen between that moment and actually hitting the road. Can you say more about how you guys decided to go for it, and how you prepared for this adventure?

Quentin: It kind of was just on a whim. You know, we didn’t have too many obligations, we didn’t have jobs where we needed to be. And we always love a road trip. There was a little bit of planning, but not too much with structuring our year or how to find birds or anything like that, because we just weren’t aware of any of that stuff. But, you know, we bought a minivan. We found a used minivan. That was part of the planning.

It was pretty quick after getting stoned and identifying one woodpecker in the backyard and deciding it’s time to go for it. We searched some things about birdwatching on the internet, found out what a Big Year was, and then just decided it’d be funny to do that. We didn’t even know we were gonna be making a documentary about it. We figured we’d make a few YouTube videos and it would just be this fun little project.

Owen: Yeah, it was November [2023], probably, and Quentin was like, well, I’ll just Google search states with the most birds, and it was like: Arizona, Texas, and Florida. And he was like, we’ll just go there. We had this thing in our mind that we were gonna see 700 birds.

Quentin: We kind of came at it with an energy of, like: Oh, we can see so many birds. We can see 700 birds. All you gotta do is drive to the place and we’ll find ‘em. But, clearly—

Owen: Turns out it’s pretty hard.

Audubon: Let’s go back even further: Where did you guys grow up? Were you always interested in nature?

Quentin: We were born in St. Louis and lived over the river in Illinois in a place called Collinsville. It’s the home of the “World’s Largest Catsup Bottle”—not a big deal. We grew up playing outside, always dirty. Our thing when we were kids was finding bugs. It’s so funny to think about now, that we were always in the woods and always outside, but we never paid attention to birds. And now, every time I go to the woods and I hear a little chirp, my brain’s going: What sparrow is that?

Audubon: Tell me about why you decided to release Listers for free on YouTube. Did you try to distribute it in a more traditional way, or do you have plans to? 

Owen: From the get-go, we were always gonna put it on YouTube. In the last like, three weeks, I’ve talked to a bunch of fancy executive producers, and they’re like, “We could get it on Netflix or HBO.” And then you look more into it, and you see it’s just a slimy business. We decided to keep it on YouTube for free. I like the idea that a homeless guy can walk into a library somewhere and watch it, you know? And people have been donating money if they like it, like that value-for-value model, and I like that better than some rich guy in Hollywood taking 65 percent of the sale to HBO, and they have no connection to nature.

Quentin: He didn’t spend a single night at a Cracker Barrel.

Owen: Yeah, he’s never even been camping in his life. He’s never shat outside. He doesn’t care about the birds.

Audubon: What kind of feedback are you guys getting on the film so far?

Owen: Mostly super positive. The cool part is people reaching out and saying, “I just dusted off my grandma’s binoculars,” or, “I just downloaded Merlin.” I just got a message yesterday that somebody got engaged after watching the movie. They were going birding for the first time in 20 years.

Quentin: That is the coolest part, when people say, “Yep, just downloaded Merlin.” Or like, “I just got a robin in my backyard.” That’s how it starts, you know?

Audubon: What was it like spending a year in a used minivan with your brother? I know your guiding rule is “never pay to sleep,” but were you on the road and living in the van all year, or did you take some breaks?

Quentin: Oh, we took breaks. We stayed back in St. Louis for a week or two here and there, because we broke it out into trips. I think it was 10 or 11 trips we went on. Our shortest one was maybe two weeks. Our longest one was over two months. And two months on the road in a minivan with your brother does wear on you.  

But honestly, like, super smooth. I don’t think I’d be able to do this with anybody else but Owen. Doing it with your brother is awesome because, I don’t know, you have a connection and so many things you don’t even have to talk about, you just understand it. Not too many arguments. None, really. Pretty much smooth sailing. We’re a good team. But, I mean, definitely two months is, like, the limit.

Owen: I think the low points are anywhere you’re trying to balance mosquitoes in the van and airflow. You still need airflow, yet you can’t run a fan all the time, because then the battery’s gonna die in the van. And then there’s southern Arizona in the summer. There were a couple nights in Tucson where, just sleeping for free on BLM land somewhere, the low was like 100 in the middle of the night. There’s some tough moments. No AC in the van.

But you’re outside, you know? You’re in the elements for a whole year. I’ve never spent that much time outside, and that’s pretty cool.

Quentin: There are points where you just have to accept that you’re not gonna be comfortable. But then you find these little moments of comfort, and it’s bliss. You walk into a gas station, you get a cold sparkling water, it’s like—that is the peak. That’ll keep you going.

Owen: Sparkling water out of a Love’s Travel Stop? That’s first class to me.

Quentin: Oh, yeah. You get a good beans and rice after a long day out in the woods? Oh, my goodness.

Audubon: You guys started out the trip with some ironic distance between you and the whole birding thing, but at some point it stopped being just a joke, and you became more earnestly in love with birds and more invested in finding the next species. Was there a moment when you noticed that change happening?

Quentin: January, our first trip down to Florida, that was our purest trip, I’d say. We were just looking for birds, going to these birding spots, and we were way on the outside, you know?

Owen: We didn’t have binoculars.

Quentin: We just had our cameras. In Florida we didn’t talk to many birders. We didn’t see the culture yet. And as things went along, we learned that, by talking to people, and going to these same spots, you’re gonna run into these people, and you’re gonna have good conversations with them, and you’re gonna have weird conversations with them.

And then I definitely got sucked into the listing aspect of things by March, April, once migration started coming around. I was pretty invested in seeing as many birds as possible. And I’d get—it was taking things over. We started out not knowing anything about birds, not having a history of birdwatching, and then kind of went straight to the listing. So we didn’t ever have that moment of, like, appreciating the birds just by watching them. We kind of skipped over that, and then hit this point where I was just getting grumpy about finding the next bird, getting the next number.

But then it hit me, and I thought about how embarrassing that is—that I’m getting grumpy about finding the next bird. From then on, it was much easier. It was just like, you know what? This list is not gonna be the biggest list in the world. You’re not gonna see every bird in the world in the United States this year. Let’s just have a good time. And that’s what we did from there on out.

I’d say probably about that time, or shortly after, is when Owen was like, yeah, I think this has to be a full-on movie. I don’t think we can just make a few videos about this. So then we kind of focused on that and would find people to interview.

Audubon: Without getting into any spoilers, I think it’s fair to say that you guys ended your Big Year with a less than enthusiastic view of hard-core listing and chasing rare birds. The folks you spoke with in the film ranged from diehard listers to others who are more skeptical of that whole approach. Did you come away from this project with an overall opinion of the birding world?

Owen: On one hand, I understand the listing thing, right? It makes sense. But I think some people wouldn’t do it at all if it wasn’t for eBird. It’s almost like a video game, you’re playing a video game on your phone. I don’t know, I think it’s good to get outside away from that. But it’s not harming anybody.

Quentin: It’s probably not a majority of people doing that, but a lot of people do care about their, you know, their year list, their county list. It’s not the worst hobby in the world, not the worst thing to have a little game going on. But at some point you’re losing that appreciation for just, like, looking at a bird.

Owen: But also, eBird—I get their side, too, because by gamifying it, they’re getting all the data, the interesting science from it.

Quentin: And as far as the birding world in general, I think it’s fantastic, because it’s such an easy—it’s like the entry level into being a naturalist. 

Owen: They’re flying around.

Quentin: They’re flying around everywhere. I feel like that’s the animal you see the most, or that’s easiest to see. Around here, if I was tasked with finding a lizard, it might take me two or three days, I don’t know. But a bird is [looks out van window]—there’s one right there, I got a Rock Pigeon right here.

It’s a great entry point into just everything. There’s a whole list of trees we identified last year, just all these new trees we know about. Mesquite is a word I’d probably heard before, but I didn’t know what it was until last year, you know?

Owen: And there’s an interesting social element, too, because I can’t think of any other hobby in which, if you see somebody else with the accessory, the binoculars, you can immediately go up and go, What have you seen today? What’s going on?

Quentin: You’re connected by something, you have something in common immediately. And we do it all the time now. Like, it’s constant. We were on a fishing trip last weekend, and we were checking out owls. Every time a kingfisher flies by, it’s: There it is, kingfisher.

Owen: We had our binoculars. We did more birdwatching than fishing. We actually didn’t catch a single fish.

Audubon: More traditional, old-guard birders might not share your approach to birding. Not everyone eats magic mushrooms before doing a pelagic trip—

Quentin: They shouldn’t, either.

Audubon: But something I think any birder, or even non-birder, would love about this documentary is that the bird footage you captured is often really beautiful and fascinating. Were there any birds that were especially challenging or rewarding to get on video?

Owen: There’s, like, 16 terabytes of footage, and most of that is bird footage. And it turns out, if you’re doing nothing but filming birds for a whole year, you’re gonna get some keepers.

It was always fun to try to get the camcorder shot with our crappy camcorder, and then try to get that exact perspective with the good camera, so that you can cut between them. It’s almost like when you’re going birding, you don’t really see it that well, and then you raise your binoculars up and you get that clear view of the bird. Those are the most rewarding, when you could get it on both cameras and then cut between them.

Audubon: In the film you guys have some pretty funny run-ins with eBird reviewers—or eBird cops, as you call them. Are you still eBirding? 

Quentin: I don’t think either one of us have made an eBird checklist since last year ended. I felt like if I don’t make the checklists and I’m just paying attention to birds, just watching them, that’ll be good for me. Early on in the year, there were points where I wanted to make a checklist. I was like, oh man, I should really make that checklist. I just saw, you know, 12 Montezuma Quails. Maybe nobody else knows they’re out here. Maybe I should write that down. I do think about the science perspective of it. I’m not a scientist. I know it’s for citizen science—

Owen: You don’t have to tell this guy you’re not a scientist.

Quentin: I’m barely a citizen.

Audubon: I understand your next project involves looking for the presumed-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker. What can you tell us about that? And is your 2010 Kia Sedona up to the task?

Quentin: Not sure the Sedona’s up to the task for this one. Don’t count it out completely. We’ll see.

Getting intro’d to birds last year, every guidebook still has the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in it. You see that in the book, and read that it says most likely extinct, and then look more into it. Last year we went on a search with a disbarred lawyer in Louisiana, and it was a good time. This guy is super passionate about conservation, he’s super knowledgeable about birds, and the way he’s speaking on it, you go: Jeez, man, did this guy actually see this bird five times? He might have. I don’t know, this guy’s selling me on it, kind of.

I’ve got a couple books on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Jim Tanner’s book, Jerome Jackson, Tim Gallagher, I’ve read all their books. Just diving into the history. We’re gonna look for ourselves. I don’t know if it’s extinct. We’re gonna go down there and look for it. Why not?

Owen: There’s all these grassland birds that are going extinct right now. There’s future Ivory-bills up there. So if we could kind of use that as a hook, and slide some conservation stuff subtly under the table while we’re at it?

Quentin: We’re not gonna find it. But we’re gonna find something else, you know? We’re still not experts by any means. At the end of all this, we’re still just two guys who looked for birds for a whole year in a minivan.

Owen: If we can do it, anybody can do it. That’s clear. It really is for everybody if these two idiots can do it.