The Birdpeople (2005)

A loose-knit community of birdwatchers in New York's Central Park; ornithologists with their specimen collections at a dozen different natural history museums; bird banders gingerly extracting birds from mist nets and collecting data in upstate New York; six people searching for an extinct bird in a Louisiana bayou: these are the strands that are woven together by The Birdpeople as it documents a passionate fixation. Part cultural history, part self-reflexive anthropolog, by turns humorous and elegiac, The Birdpeople examines the pleasures of looking and naming, and investigates the social construction of nature, centered on ornithology and its amateur counterpart, bird watching.