Home Video Hovel- Birders, by Kyle Anderson
There’s been a spate of documentary films and programs about people and their strange or unusual hobbies of late. I seem to recall noticing there were about four different docs on Netflix Instant about Star Trek and people who enjoy it alone. That show was originally on for just three years, I’d like everyone to remember. Regardless, some of these movement-based documentaries are better than others; some are really pleasant to watch, while others make one feel like never leaving their apartment again. One that mercifully falls in the former category is the short documentary Birders: The Central Park Effect. It lovely takes a look at birdwatchers and the various migratory birds that inhabit the famous swath of nature in the middle of huge, tall buildings and car exhaust.“Birding,” which is the verb form of the act of spotting different types of avian creatures and writing about them in notebooks, is apparently a massive subculture in Manhattan, with lots of people gathering in mainly Spring and Autumn in Central Park to look for the brightly-colored birds heading from South America to Canada or vice versa. The people depicted in the film are not novices; these people recognize even the most obscure varieties of thrushes, warblers, and nuthatches. The birds, for their part, seem unaffected by, or uninterested in, the people watching them, which then allows them to be spotted. It’s a symbiotic relationship. And it happens every year; apparently the birds instinctively hone in on the park due to it being the only real vegetation/insect hatchery for miles and miles.The film, by Jeffrey Kimball, a music supervisor by trade, explores the birds that arrive, yes, but more over it shows us the birders themselves, many of them whilst they bird. Just like rabid fans of anything outside the mainstream, the birders are well aware of their place among other people, and largely they don’t care. One of the birders interviewed is acclaimed author Jonathan Franzen, who speaks openly about his “nerdy” hobby, which he’d likely not tell most people about. Also featured is a woman who has birded for so many years, she’s begun giving guided bird-watching expeditions, for $8 per person. These two are the ones with whom we spend the most time; however there are many other people with their own interesting stories. The birders are so plentiful that they’ve begun movements as a group to catalogue and protect the winged visitors.At only 60 minutes, it’s surprising how much information is actually tackled. It’s not a hard-hitting expose on anything, but it does very accurately represent a pastime about which I knew very little. I’ve never really been a big fan of birds, but the film does an excellent job of making each species seem unique in behavior and personality and not merely from the way it looks. It’s a pleasant, and oddly relaxing, way to spend an hour, not unlike going out and watching birds yourself. As one interviewee observed: “Who’d ever get tired of looking at birds?”