The new YouTube documentary Listers is a down-the-rabbit-hole glimpse at the norms and neuroses of the “extreme bird-watching” community. If that sounds painfully boring, it’s not—this is one of the funniest documentaries I’ve seen in some time. In it, the brothers Quentin and Owen Reiser chronicle their try at a “big year,” a bird-nerd term for attempting to identify as many different species as possible in a single calendar year. They start out knowing next to nothing about birds—an app designer and a cinematographer from Collinsville, Illinois, the Reisers get into birding after one of them stumbles across an ornithological guidebook during a bleary-eyed smoke session. Then they buy a $4,500 Kia Sedona and traverse the country with the goal of finding more than 700 unique specimens. Although both brothers are the subjects of the film, Quentin spends most of the time on camera while Owen remains behind the lens. He alternates between a low-tech camcorder and a high-resolution camera, the former to capture the mundane and often gritty work of tracking down birds, and the latter to reveal their quarry in all its splendor.
On their bird-maxxing quest, the two cook endless beans and sleep in a shocking number of Cracker Barrel parking lots. Quentin takes magic mushrooms on a seabird boat tour. The vibe here is less Animal Planet and more Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: “It’s all gonna be, like, accurate? Scientifically accurate?” Owen asks early on when he learns that his brother is planning to create an illustrated bird guide about their travels. “Yeah,” Quentin responds, deadpan. The camera zooms in on his drawing of a bird—one presumes a tufted titmouse—with crude, cartoonish boobs protruding from its feathers.
But underneath the stoner hijinks (and legitimately stunning wildlife videography), Listers is a serious film about the meaning that hobbies can provide to our lives, and the corrupting influence of smartphone apps on our leisure activities. As the documentary progresses, it gradually begins to examine how eBird, a social app that is popular in the bird-watching community, has overtaken the pastime. The brothers start without complaints about eBird, which connects them with other hobbyists, helps them track their progress when they “list” birds, and provides a ranking system so they can see how they’re stacking up against other birders. But by the end of the year, they become disillusioned by eBird and interview other hobbyists who are as well. “This country is so big, and you have to go everywhere in the country to see enough birds to be in the power rankings or whatever the fuck it is,” Quentin grouses. “I like bird-watching, but I don’t like it in the competitive sense.”
Birding is not the only hobby with an app problem. So many leisure pursuits now have their own gamified digital platforms: Untappd for beer enthusiasts. Strava for runners. Ravelry for knitters. Fishbrain for fishermen. Beli for foodies. Goodreads and Letterboxd for bookworms and movie buffs. The list goes on. Some have anointed these sorts of hobby apps a new, “kinder” frontier for social media: Sharing your knitting patterns is certainly more wholesome than bare-knuckle political fighting on X. But like all online social networks, these apps—many of which include leaderboards, progress bars, and achievement badges—have a corrosive side, one I’ve experienced myself as a runner. I used to log my runs, until I realized I was putting on my sneakers and getting out the door simply because I wanted to see my stats go up. I found that the apps made me more focused on narrow metrics, such as my VO2 max or total weekly miles, than the pleasure derived from the hobby itself.
Complaints about the intrusion of technology into hobbies are not new. Leisure activities have always been settings in which what academics call “conspicuous consumption” is common—enthusiasts flaunt the latest high-tech golf clubs or fly rods or bird-watching binoculars as a way to demonstrate their seriousness or skill (even when they don’t have much of either). But hobby gamification has added a novel and far more perverse twist to this long-standing trend: conspicuous accumulation, users’ vying for in-app prestige by logging, listing, or otherwise compiling as much online data as possible.
Watching the birders in Listers discuss their love-hate relationship with the eBird app, I was reminded less of their feathered friends than of another class of winged creatures—parasitoid wasps. I became fascinated by these hellish insects years ago after reading a letter in which Charles Darwin described their existence as proof against “a beneficent & omnipotent God.” It’s not hard to see why: The wasps inject eggs into a host, usually a caterpillar, and when they hatch, the larvae eat the unfortunate creature from the inside out, taking care to leave the vital organs intact so that their meal ticket doesn’t die too soon. Eventually, the larvae hijack the host’s brain, turning the caterpillar into their slave. From the outside, the parasitized insect still looks like a normal caterpillar, but the guts of the thing have been emptied out, and it now exists to serve an entirely different master. Eventually, it dies of starvation.
This makes for a grisly analogy, but it’s an apt one. As Listers demonstrates, hobby apps such as eBird parasitize our leisure pursuits from within: The app stops being a way to engage with the hobby and instead turns the hobby into a way to engage with the app. From the outside, the hobby still looks the same—you’re still running, or watching an art film, or peeping a bufflehead sea duck through your binoculars—but the goal is no longer the experience itself.
Perhaps the only truly chilling scene in the otherwise lighthearted Listers occurs when one of the brothers questions a top-ranked birder about what motivates him. “If eBird didn’t exist, would you still go bird-watching?” Owen asks. “No!” the other man says, shaking his head vigorously and laughing, as though the very prospect of birding without the app is ridiculous.
The response raises an interesting philosophical question: Is this man actually a birder at all? Can you be a true bird-watcher if your main source of joy is not, you know, the birds? It would seem that his actual hobby is the app. The audience of Listers is made to understand the tragedy of many of these men and women who look and act like birders but whose primary love is no longer the birds themselves or the environments in which they’re found, rather the glowing screen they’re so bound to. The platform is not all bad—at its best, it provides an admirable example of citizen science and generates useful data for researchers—but the brothers, and those they interview, know all too well that eBird can be a fun suck as much as it can be an avenue for fulfillment.
“I’m tired of these fucking assholes who work for the bird software,” Quentin vents near the end of the documentary. He’s miffed about how often the app rejects his photos, but he’s also angry that it matters to him in the first place. By the end of Listers, he decides the app mostly doesn’t matter to him. He still loves birding but seems to hate eBird. The irony, of course, is that his documentary is as likely to turn people off the app as it is to drive new users to it.
In a humorous final montage, we learn that the birder who wouldn’t bird if it weren’t for the app broke a record by identifying 758 birds in a year, and that Quentin and Owen—impressively for neophytes—ranked 23rd in the contiguous United States, listing 579 birds. To celebrate, the boys crack a Martinelli’s Gold Medal Sparkling Cider and tell a gas-station attendant about their success. “Not bragging, but we’ve seen 579 species of bird this year,” Quentin informs the young woman behind the register. When she responds, “Pretty cool,” we get the distinct sense that she does not, in fact, think it is pretty cool. The Reisers don’t care. They’re in it for the birds.
