Their Birding Documentary Became a Surprise Hit, but the Reiser Brothers Are Just Getting Started

Look, Quentin and Owen Reiser know it’s all but impossible they’ll see an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The last irrefutable sighting of the two-foot-tall bird in a southeastern forest was in 1944—half a century before they were born. They’re looking for it anyway. 

Before we get to the how and why of their quixotic pursuit, a suggestion: If you haven’t seen the Reisers’ offbeat documentary, Listers, stop reading this story and watch it for free on YouTube. The feature-length movie follows the brothers on their 2024 Big Year quest to see as many birds as possible in the Lower 48. What sets Listers apart from other Big Year narratives and nature documentaries in general is that the Reisers were complete novices with limited funds. They bought a 2010 Kia Sedona minivan on the cheap, installed bunk beds, googled which states have the most birds, and then headed south from the Midwest. The result is a delightful, irreverent road-trip adventure that simultaneously lampoons “listers”—single-minded birders who jet across the country to add another species to their count—while also celebrating the simple joy of watching birds and being in nature (even when “nature” is a landfill). 

For their next film, the Reisers are documenting an even more obsessive birding subculture: Ivory-billed Woodpecker searchers. Whether the species survives is among the biggest controversies in the birding community. While reports of new sightings continue to trickle in, the evidence consists mainly of grainy videos, blurry photos, and inconclusive audio recordings. Heightening the stakes is federal wildlife officials’ proposal to declare the Ivory-bill extinct; their final decision could come any day. Searchers, a small cadre that includes professional ornithologists and die-hard believers, are determined to get indisputable proof that the bird persists. The Reisers are joining the hunt. “It’s ripe with mystery and comedy,” Quentin says. “What if we actually found it?”

On an unseasonably warm mid-November day in central Louisiana, photographer Micah Green and I join the brothers in donning long-sleeved camouflage shirts, pants, and muck boots in an undisclosed forest. (I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the exact location.) Following their lead, we decline the face paint proffered by veteran searcher John Henry Hyde, who says he’s seen the Ivory-bill 10 times in two decades. Hyde—who has experience as a rodeo competitor, mastodon-bone collector, and hemp farmer—lives in Tennessee and takes one or more trips a year to Louisiana to search. His friend Tony Marinella, an Arizona-based professional photographer, got hooked three years ago when he started making his own documentary about Hyde’s mission.

Most birders wouldn’t venture into this terrain, Marinella says. There are venomous snakes. There are no trails. On a visit eight months earlier, the two became separated and Hyde got lost. At some point during the 24 hours before a search-and-rescue team located him, Hyde says he looked up and, in a severely dehydrated haze, watched an Ivory-bill fly overhead. “I probably saw it for four seconds,” he says. “A four-second eternity.” His helmet camera didn’t capture the footage; the battery had died. Before we set out, Hyde and Marinella double-check their cameras and GPS device and hand each of us a baby Jesus figurine for protection. Then Hyde straightens his camouflage helmet, picks up a foam Ivory-bill affixed to a walking stick, and says, “Are you ready to go to hell?” 

Standing behind them, Quentin closes his eyes and shakes his head. The brothers explored the area with Hyde and Marinella the previous day and know what to expect. “It’s a walk,” Owen whispers to me, “in the woods.”

The Reisers approach the outing with unwavering good humor and laid-back curiosity. They scan the towering cypresses for the huge cavities that Ivory-bills hammer out; note the Golden-crowned Kinglets and Carolina Chickadees calling; and gleefully poke puffball mushrooms growing on logs. They listen far more than they talk.

They’ve spent only a few hours with Hyde and Marinella, but it’s clear the Reisers have a knack for creating an easy camaraderie with strangers. While scanning the leaf-covered ground for cottonmouths, Owen spots a huge beetle. “John, I’ll pay you $20 to eat that beetle,” he says. Hyde snorts: “You ain’t got $20, you little shit.” The brothers crack up. Later, I ask them how, a couple weeks in, the project is going. “I was worried it wouldn’t be funny enough,” Quentin says, “until we met John and Tony.”

Listers set the bar high—its humor is one reason it has been viewed more than 3 million times and was one of Slate’s top 10 movies of 2025. Now, although they’re narrowing their focus to one species, they’re also widening their lens beyond what it means to be a birder and exploring the precarious place birds hold in our world. To invite a broad audience, they’ll do so in the same charming guise of “two idiots who don’t know anything,” as Owen puts it. But make no mistake: The Reisers know exactly what they’re doing.

Before our stroll through hell, Green and I had arranged to meet up with the Reisers in a Dollar General parking lot. A minivan pulled in shortly after we arrived. It was a Kia Sedona, the same make and model as the vehicle in Listers, but it was maroon. “Isn’t theirs blue?” Green asked. 

We were reassured when the occupants emerged. The mullet and mustache made Quentin, 30, immediately recognizable. Owen, 26, sported a baseball cap from the optics company Maven, the brothers’ only sponsor. Quentin, it turned out, hadn’t wanted to drive the older van from his girlfriend’s place in Washington State. So Owen, who had been staying with their parents in Collinsville, Illinois, procured a new ride. What type was never in question: In October he purchased a 2012 Sedona. A month later they had already replaced a front wheel bearing and were finding the glitchy power-sliding doors annoying; no matter. “It’s worth it,” Owen says. “You have to commit to the bit.” 

The brothers learned the value of a good bit at a young age. They adored The Crocodile Hunter, the exuberant wildlife documentary TV series in which Steve Irwin would shout his catchphrase—“Crikey!”—in moments of surprise or awe. The show, in part, inspired them to get outside: They explored the vacant lot next door and used the family insect guide to identify bugs, fished for bluegills in the nearby lake, rode bikes, and played hockey and soccer. They also revered Saturday Night Live and used the family camcorder to make their own videos. When they were 8 and 12, their dad helped them burn a compilation of their mock infomercials and stunts onto a DVD. They called it Owen and Quentin’s Stupid Movie. “We were so stoked on it,” Owen recalls. “We got our own movie.”

As they got older, they began uploading clips to YouTube. Their longtime friend Joel Cluphf points to their 2016 short about visiting all 45 Shop ’n Save grocery stores in 24 hours as an early indication of their wry humor and documentary chops. “Quentin’s drive to do silly stuff and try to find joy in doing mundane things and Owen’s ability to create a larger piece of art out of it really work well together,” Cluphf says. “They’re the most creative people I know.”

They’re also hardwired to give it their all. “If they’re on something, they’re on it,” says their mom, Whitney Reiser. To her and Cluphf, it seemed perfectly natural that they fully committed to a Big Year two days after Quentin got stoned and flipped through the family’s bird guide. At the time, he was developing apps. (His first commercial product was a highly practical swimming pool test-strip scanning app.) Owen—who had worked as a cinematographer on BBC and National Geographic nature documentaries, including America the Beautiful and America’s National Parks—was between jobs but had some money coming in from licensing fees. (His most lucrative footage is a time-lapse video of a deer decomposing; metal bands like to play it on giant screens during their concerts.)

The brothers didn’t set out to make a documentary. They figured they’d do a series of short videos. Though they had zero knowledge of birds, they started their Big Year as experienced road trippers who have a rule against paying to camp and swear by Love’s Travel Stops, where there’s always decaf coffee (their beverage of choice, second only to sparkling water). They’re adept at auto repair, a skill they picked up fixing and selling used cars with a mechanic friend during the pandemic. Quentin does the driving and cooking, which balances the time Owen spends filming and editing. But three months in, they decided that goofy updates about their harebrained adventure wouldn’t cut it.

“The story was deeper than that,” Quentin says. They were meeting people driven to outlandish extremes by their passion for creatures that cared nothing for them—people who might have little in common beyond that shared enthusiasm. “If you spent all day on the internet trying to get a sense of what America’s like, you might think everyone hates each other; everyone is always disagreeing,” Quentin says. “But when you travel around the country for a year, you see people of all walks of life helping each other, getting along.” For Owen, who was capturing stunning avian footage, it was a chance to do something different from the wildlife documentaries he’d enjoyed working on but didn’t particularly like to watch. “They often dumb down nature by relying on cheesy storylines and anthropomorphizing animals,” he says. 

They started interviewing an array of people disarmed by the brothers’ affability, from avid listers concerned primarily with their tallies to field biologists focused on the birds. “If you find the right person,” Quentin says, “and you ask them a small question about their hobby, they’re itching to tell you all about it.”

During their Big Year, they occasionally crashed with their parents and teenage brother and shared amusing snippets of their travels. By the end of the adventure, their mom noticed that another thread had emerged. “They’ve always loved the outdoors,” she says. But as they made Listers, “their eyes opened more to conservation.”

For this trip, instead of googling where to go, the Reisers are using a 1942 book published by the National Audubon Society, The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker by ornithologist James Tanner, to plot a route through the species’ historic range. The day after we visited the forest that shall not be named, we leave Hyde and Marinella and drive three hours northeast to the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge: one of the last remaining large tracts of bottomland hardwood forest and a former Ivory-bill stronghold.  

At Africa Lake, a muddy-green sliver surrounded by majestic cypress trees, the guys assemble their collapsible kayaks—an upgrade from the boats they made from duct tape and plastic sheeting in Listers. Nonetheless, they’re dubious about the structural integrity, especially in alligator-infested waters. But any mortal concerns are seemingly soon forgotten as Owen tries to board Quentin’s craft. “Piracy!” Quentin shouts. They call a truce and resume paddling, methodically scanning the trees. Owen plays an Ivory-bill call recorded nearby 90 years ago. An American Crow caws back. Owen’s position as cameraman affords him skepticism, so he admits he thinks the Ivory-bill is extinct. As for Quentin, the on-camera face of this quirky journey, “I need to believe it might be out there,” he says. “It’s my role.”

The mix of earnest effort and antics is pure Reiser brothers. In Listers, they didn’t just observe an American Dipper; they took a dip with the aquatic songbird. While they make themselves the ultimate punch line, they also poke fun at their subjects—something one might expect to rankle birders. But judging from thousands of comments in YouTube and Reddit threads and in blog posts about the movie, those who took umbrage were a tiny minority. Most birders responded in the vein of one YouTube viewer: “These dudes nailed birding culture—the joy, the idiocy, and the moral ambiguity.”  

The film resonated with some of the birding world’s most prominent figures. Kenn Kaufman, Audubon field editor and preeminent bird-guide author, was struck by the spectacular bird footage, including an Altamira Oriole dislodging a Green Jay from its perch and a Loggerhead Shrike devouring its prey. In contrast, Kaufman points to Hollywood’s version of the competition: the 2011 comedy The Big Year starring Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson. “That big-budget movie has hardly any birds in it,” Kaufman says. “The irreverence of the Reisers’ approach is balanced by the fact that they really looked closely at these birds and appreciated them.” 

For viewers left wanting more, Quentin created an illustrated book, Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States, with funny stories and QR codes that link to outtakes. (Kaufman was tickled by the blurb that spoofed him: “This does not help me identify birds at all.” —Kent Hoffman.) The $23 book was part passion project, part income generator. Studios came knocking after Listers surpassed 100,000 views, but the Reisers decided not to sell. It wouldn’t have made them anywhere near rich. What’s more, everyone wanted to change the movie. “It wouldn’t be just ours anymore,” Owen says. “It wouldn’t be us.” 

To Nick Lund, an Audubon contributor and nature writer, the guide is a treasure all its own. “It’s a really innovative entry into the Big Year chronicle genre,” he says. “It’s such a cool experience to watch a video of what you’re reading about.” In one of his favorite clips, the guys are looking for a rare Rose-throated Becard. Owen is panicked. He just saw the bird, but Quentin is answering the call of nature. Then, relief: Quentin emerges from the bushes in time to see it. “A quintessential birding experience,” Lund says.

The very idea of competitive birding seems nuts to an outsider, says S.R. Bindler, director of the Reisers’ favorite documentary, Hands on a Hardbody. Bindler knows obsessives make great movie characters: His award-winning 1997 film details an endurance competition in which 24 contestants vie to win a pickup truck by holding their hand on it the longest. The brothers found the perfect tonal approach to their own subculture of obsessives, Bindler says: “They take an unserious look at a subject that is very serious for many people and, in the end, are deeply affected by it. As was I.” Listers gave him a new appreciation for birds, prompting him to dust off his binoculars and keep them on the porch within easy reach. 

Even people who couldn’t pick a Dark-eyed Junco out of a lineup delighted in the film, a testament to the Reisers’ skill as appealing guides to the unknown. Kate Mannion convinced her cohosts on The Yak, a sports and pop culture podcast, to watch it. When she later announced that the Reisers were stopping by, she says, “It was like Tom Brady was coming into the office.” Part of Listers’ broad appeal, she says, is that from the get-go it’s nothing like a typical nature documentary: “It’s this hockey guy who smoked a joint and wanted to see birds.” That piques people’s interest, and then they get hooked. “It sounds cliché, but with everything going on in the world and on the internet, there’s all this ick,” Mannion says. “This was so pure. They’re not trying to sell you on it; it’s just, like, come discover along the way with us.” 

The Ivory-bill film will still be entertaining, Owen says, but it will also address conservation challenges head-on. Back in Louisiana, we drive 20 minutes from the refuge to the Singer Tract, where in the 1930s Tanner studied an Ivory-bill family living among giant sweet gum trees. We stand in silence while looking at a sea of soybean fields. “It’s really creepy,” Quentin says. Despite the National Audubon Society’s offer to buy critical portions, the area was clear-cut in the 1940s. Before we depart, the Reisers paste a poster on a bridge—minor vandalism they’re committing at sites throughout the trip. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker illustration will fade, but for a while, at least, the lost bird is home again.

When I catch up with the brothers on Zoom in early January, each calls in from his respective van. They had wrapped up the first leg of their Ivory-bill road trip in Florida. Then they’d visited the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York State, where they were thrilled to get an up-close look at Ivory-bill specimens (and where Quentin suggested numerous improvements to the Merlin and eBird apps). It’s been a few days since they spoke, and to their collective amusement and dismay, they discover they’re both doing another Big Year. Probably. Maybe. They both started tallying birds on January 1.

They’ve decided that in February, they’ll follow Tanner’s maps to Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas, a key area for modern searchers. Quentin suggests they might revisit some sites on the way: “I know we already went to Arkansas, but why not go again?” Owen sighs dramatically. “We can do more shenanigans,” Quentin continues. “And I’m still going to be looking for the woodpecker.” 

Then, after driving more than 5,000 miles in search of the Ivory-bill, they plan to shift their focus to birds that are assuredly alive and to people working to help them survive. Talking with ornithologists and conservationists, they’ve come to understand that the grassland habitats that myriad bird species depend on are among the most at risk. “There’s been all this attention on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, this big, beautiful bird that we’ve lost,” Owen says. “But there are these future Ivory-bills: the Baird’s Sparrow, the Lesser Prairie-Chicken, the Chestnut-collared Longspur.” 

Even as they’re immersed in the Ivory-bill movie, the Reisers are mulling their next project. They’re in talks with a production company about delving into the fishing world—another rich subculture with a big stake in conservation. “We’re not anti-funding; it just has to be right,” Owen says. “It’d be interesting to get a portrait of America through the different types of fishing.” The dismissive attitudes that bait fishers have toward fly-fishers and vice versa hold humorous promise, he says. “Plus, we’re not very good at fishing.” 

They plan to release the Ivory-bill movie for free on YouTube in late spring. It’s sure to have a rich mix of characters, plenty of hijinks, and a unique view into a slice of our history and our future. And anyone with an internet connection can go along for the ride.

This story originally ran in the Spring 2026 issue as “Seriously Funny.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.