LA’s birding community reacts to Hallmark’s birder romcom: ‘They really blew it’

L.A. is home to both Hollywood and a passionate birding community — but the two don’t always see eye to eye.

“Birders are always getting annoyed watching movies,” said Marcos Trinidad, senior director of forestry at TreePeople and an avid birder. And that’s because movies so often get bird facts wrong.

“The classic example is how almost always when there is footage of a bald eagle, it’s overlaid with the sound of a red-tailed hawk,” Trinidad said.

And so it’s not surprising that when the Hallmark Channel announced Adventures in Love & Birding with a poster on Instagram — their new rom-com about a single mother who falls in love with an avid birder — birders went off in the comments.

One user wrote, “I wonder what those two male varied thrushes are talking about 😂.” Another, “I hope they hired a location manager to ensure that they are showing correct birds in correct regions or the birding community is gonna go BONKERS.”

I was curious about how birders would react to the actual movie, so I reached out to local birders and tagged along to an Adventures in Love & Birding watch party to get reactions in real time.

Birders react

On the first Saturday of fall, I went to avid birder Jamin Warren’s house. He was hosting his friend Brett Karley, fellow avid birder and founder of Bird Club — a sustainable clothing line for birders. The two are part of the LA Birding Community Chat Group, a WhatsApp group with over 200 members. They were meeting up to sip on beers and watch Adventures in Love & Birding.

Pretty immediately, the two picked up on aspects of birding that didn’t ring true.

“If this guy's like a real birder trying to be a guide, he would not have those binoculars,” Karley said. “Those binoculars are like Porro prisms. … They're very old fashioned or very beginner level.”

They also thought some of the bird calls didn't match the birds that were shown on screen: “So they played the trill of a screech owl, but that looks like a great horned owl,” Karley said.

But perhaps the film's biggest birding fumble, according to Karley and Warren, is that it failed to capture the excitement of spotting a bird you've wanted to see for a long time — which for a lot of birders is the greatest thrill of the hobby.

The movie sets up that the male lead has always wanted to see a spotted owl, but when he finally does, it’s anti-climactic.

“They just stumble upon it and they weren't pumped about it?!?” said Karley. “They missed on all levels. They really blew it. I'd like to hear from [Hallmark] about that part.”

I reached out to the Hallmark Channel about the use of consultants or experts to address birding in the movie. They did not respond by deadline.

Hallmark making moves into fall — and the increasingly popular world of birding

Adventures in Love & Birding is part of the Hallmark Channel’s expanding autumnal offerings, as the network tries to conquer larger audiences outside of their extremely popular “Countdown to Christmas” — a yearly fresh slate of Christmas-themed rom-coms.

From a marketing perspective, it makes sense that Hallmark would want to tap into the birding community — it’s a hobby that experienced a boom in the last five years.

During the pandemic, bird-watching surged in popularity, as it was one of the only acceptable socially distanced activities.

According to a 2022 survey from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the estimated total number of birdwatchers more than doubled from the previous survey in 2016 — finding that around 96 million people in the U.S. engaged in birding.

Bringing birding to the masses

Despite its inaccuracies, Karley and Warren had fun watching Adventures in Love & Birding.

“I appreciated that they went for a birding movie and that a lot of people are talking about it, so that it's more in the public eye,” Karley said.

At the end of the day, what Karley and Warren most care about is more people getting into the hobby and it not being seen as some eccentric marginal activity.

“My whole thing now is making it more widespread and getting rid of the stigma that it's like a bunch of unapproachable, antisocial people,” Karley said.

And, as Warren pointed out to me, birding is one of the hobbies where the more people who participate, the better it is for research and conservation. When birders report what they see in popular birding apps, actual scientists use that data to track bird populations.

“Birding is really interesting in that it's a way that people can contribute to science in a meaningful way just by counting birds in their backyard,” Warren said. “The more people that do this, the more they add to everyone's individual experience by keeping an eye on their little patch and kind of adding collectively to the experience.”