How Movies and TV Made Birdwatchers Uncool—and Then Cool Again
A century of screen history shows how heroic conservationists became tweed-clad caricatures, and when Hollywood finally started to ditch the tired trope.
By Nicholas Lund
Contributor, Audubon magazine
Published October 07, 2026
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I started birding in 2005 after pulling a used field guide off a bookstore shelf. I had never been birding, didn’t know any birders, and only knew one birding fact: It was not cool.
But where did I get that idea? Without knowing any birders personally, I decided that my aversion must have come from the media—from cultural opinions I had picked up by osmosis. I wondered: Was it true that the media portrayed birding as dorky? Was it always that way?
To investigate, I’ve searched back as far as I can for examples of birders in movies and on TV, charting the ways that birding has been represented over time. It’s changed a lot, I’ve found, across several distinct eras, as illustrated by some key moments below. Let’s dive in.
1900—1945: The Hero Years
According to bird researcher Robert Francis, birds were a popular subject during the silent film era. They were accessible, easy to film, and at the center of a wave of conservation to stop poaching (coinciding with the founding of the National Association of Audubon Societies). The result was dozens of films featuring birds and hero conservationists. Some were closer to nature documentaries, while others were dramas produced in partnership with early movie studios. In The Spirit of Audubon, for example, the literal ghost of John James Audubon shames a boy for robbing eggs from birds’ nests and takes him and his sister on a whirlwind tour of American birdlife. No footage remains, unfortunately.
Conservation themes continued throughout of the silent era and into the talkies. In the 1944 British comedy The Tawny Pipit, an injured fighter pilot is released from the hospital and, using a gifted field guide, discovers a pair of rare Tawny Pipits nesting in a field in England. The pilot and his girlfriend (who was his nurse) enlist the local townspeople to protect the nest from a stream of threats, including army trainees, a plow, egg thieves, and...
Birders. Though this is an early representation of them, all the clichés are there: They’re old, bumbling, and overdressed in tweed and khaki. The townspeople are at first wary of their presence (they’re mistaken for more “egg-stealers”), but the birders are aware of how special the pipits are and work for their protection, setting up a blind and taking turns viewing (skip to 33:44 in the video above). It is, overall, a fairly respectful representation in a movie wholly inspired by conservation. The stage was set for our next era.
1946—1966: The Golden Years
The 1950s were a good time for birdwatchers in the United States, in real life and on the big screen. Americans in the 1950s enjoyed relative peace and prosperity and had more free time to pursue hobbies. Miles of new highways aided exploration, high-quality optics developed during WWII flooded the market, and new and better field guides became widely available. This all combined to spur fresh interest in birding, and its newfound popularity was reflected on screen.
In addition to there being a lot more birders in the ’50s, there were also a lot more people watching TV. To meet the demand, studios launched a slew of new programs—cartoons and sitcoms and other shows that competed for the public’s attention—and needed to constantly come up with ideas for episodes.
Birding frequently showed up in cartoons, including Woody Woodpecker’s “Watch the Birdie” from 1958 (Woody is a real jerk for no reason!) and Rocky and Bullwinkle’s “The Treasure of Monte Zoom” (1962). Even Popeye picked up binoculars at the behest of Oliv Oyl, saying “Okay, boid, I’m watchin’ ya” in 1960’s “Bird Watcher Popeye.”
Birding appeared in sitcoms, as well. In the 1960 episode of Dennis the Menace called “Dennis’ Tree House,” Dennis’ neighbor Mr. Wilson discovers a rare (and totally fake) Canadian Crested Warbler in his backyard. He then invites local birdwatching bigwigs to confirm the sighting and hopefully include him on their local birding Honor Scroll. It’s a six-decade-old episode of TV that—if you swapped “Honor Scroll” with “American Birding Association Podcast’s Rare Bird Focus” —would look almost identical today.
What made the Golden Years era so special was that birding was not the butt of the joke.
What made the Golden Years era so special was that birding was not the butt of the joke. It wasn’t inherently odd or nerdy to be a birdwatcher during this time, even in comedy programs. But things took a hard turn in the 1960s, with one character singlehandedly souring the reputation of birding for decades to come.
It wasn’t Burt Lancaster in 1962’s Birdman of Alcatraz, who played a murderer in prison who finds salvation in becoming an ornithologist. And it wasn’t The Birds, the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller from 1963 where a town of people is literally murdered by gulls, crows, and other birds.
No, the character that ruined birding, that locked in a reputation of birders as khaki-clad dorks that took decades to unwind, was... Miss Jane Hathaway.
1966: The Hathaway Line
The debut of Miss Jane Hathaway’s birding obsession in a 1966 episode of The Beverly Hillbillies titled “The Bird-Watchers” was a turning point for birders—an event I call The Hathaway Line.
In his book Of a Feather, in a chapter called “Death to Miss Hathaway,” Scott Weidensaul sets the stage: “Miss Jane Hathaway – the tall spinster played by Nancy Culp, who’d pop up in with a pith helmet and a pair of binoculars, so starchy, so prim, so nerdy… None of which mattered, except that she was a bird-watcher.” Weidensaul writes about encountering Miss Hathaway for the first time as a kid, seeing her and her “dweeby little friends, prancing around in their tweeds and sensible shoes, with binoculars around their skinny necks and spectacles perched on their ridiculous faces.” They were ridiculous characters, he realized, and so maybe birdwatching was ridiculous, too.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of this seemingly minor character. The Beverly Hillbillies was one of the most popular TV shows of the 1960s, with each episode reaching tens of millions of viewers. Jane Hathaway appeared in 246 episodes across 9 seasons. She wasn’t always birdwatching, but only a few times was enough to associate her with birding forever and sink the hobby’s reputation. Consequently, the next few decades were pretty bleak.
1967—2011: The Bleak Years
Here’s what’s ironic about the Bleak Years: Birding was growing as a subculture and hobby in the 1970s. The American Birdwatcher’s Association (now the American Birding Association) was founded in 1969, and hip, young birders like Kenn Kaufman were hitchhiking their way around the country in search of lifers and adventure. Birding was kind of cool—it just wasn’t shown that way on TV.
The dismissive mainstream attitude is summed up pretty clearly in the intro to this 1979 episode of “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” about an Audubon Christmas Bird Count (emphasis mine): “In the sharp, early morning sunshine of a Long Island winter, five men keep an annual appointment with nature. Why are they up at dawn in this frozen landscape? They’re counting birds—and it’s not nearly as silly as it sounds.” C’mon man!
Birding rarely appeared in mass media in the decades after Miss Hathaway, and when it did it was not portrayed kindly. It was the height of un-coolness when Katherine Hepburn was shrieking about loons in On Golden Pond (1981). Birding was associated with creepiness in Beetlejuice (1988), mental instability in Serial Mom (1994), and sexual deviance in 2001’s Fast Sofa, a movie so bizarre that I think all English-language versions have been scrubbed from the internet (though please note Crispin Glover’s insane tweed-jacket-and-red-bow-tie birding outfit).
During the Bleak Years birding was also a popular narrative tool in horror movies. Horror directors need an excuse to get people into remote areas to be killed off, after all, and birders can be a perfect fit. The plot of 1988’s Zombie 5: Killing Birds involves a bunch of teenagers getting murdered in the swamps of Louisiana while searching for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. In 1981’s Don’t Go Into the Woods, a lone birder (also in a ridiculous tweed jacket and red bow tie, despite all his hiking buddies wearing normal clothes) is an early casualty.
During the Bleak Years birding was also a popular narrative tool in horror movies.
Birding also occasionally shows up in police procedurals. Birders are people who may be in remote places and stumble upon a crime scene or clue. Or maybe they see a crucial event through their binoculars.
In the 1985 Murder, She Wrote episode “A Lady in the Lake,” Jessica Fletcher runs into a meek, nerdy birdwatcher at a lakeside lodge. (Spoiler alert: the birder is the murderer!) Birders find body parts in bird nests in a 2003 episode of CSI and a 2008 episode of Bones. Birders photograph crimes in episodes of both Law and Order: SVU and NCIS, and Criminal Minds features a plotline where a criminal leaves dead Nelson’s Sparrows, of all things, at his crime scenes. I’m sure there are more.
2011—present: The Renaissance
Cracks were beginning to show in birding’s nerdy reputation in the early and mid-2000s. The 2001 Canadian film Rare Birds follows a down-on-his-luck restaurant owner who fakes the sighting of a rare bird—the completely made up Tasker’s Sulphureous Duck—to drum up business. The restaurant owner calls his fake sighting into a bird-themed radio show (!) hosted by a birder wearing, of course, a tweed jacket and red bow tie. (Why always a red bow tie!?) A 2005 Will and Grace episode features Luke Perry as a hunky gay birder looking, incredibly but not entirely unbelievably, at a Golden-cheeked Warbler in a wintry Central Park.
But it was 2011’s The Big Year that marked the turning point in how birding is treated in the wider culture. It was a delightful movie, but more importantly it presented the revolutionary idea that birding was something that normal people participated in, wearing normal clothes (not a single bow tie!) and talking normally. The flood gates were open.
When the Hallmark Channel takes notice, you really know the stigma is gone.
In 2013, A Birder’s Guide to Everything showed that cool people like Sir Ben Kingsley and a bunch of normal teenagers could be birders, and The Birder aka the Bird Men (2013) showed that the same thing could happen in Canada. Mark Ruffalo used the Merlin App on HBO’s Task last year, and the main character in Netflix’s The Residence (2025) was a birdwatching detective solving a murder at the White House. Gen Z is getting in on the act, too, with Listers becoming a sensation on YouTube last year.
When the Hallmark Channel takes notice, you really know the stigma is gone. The 2020 rom-com Love & Glamping proved that being a birder won’t prevent an uptight city girl from falling in love with you, and 2025’s Adventures in Love & Birding, based on a novel, showed that conventionally attractive men and women can find love while birding, especially if they’re each able to attract miniature male Varied Thrushes to perch and kiss on their hands.
After Hallmark Channel movies and Gen Z, what's left for birding to conquer? I mean, we've even conquered the final frontier: space. In the 2026 episode of Starfleet Academy “Rubincon,” two characters bond over their love of birdwatching. Are there birds in space? Who knows, but birding has come light years since its early days on the big screen.
