The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch | Hacker News Reader

The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch

slate.com

133 pointsprawn16 comments

This was a fun read. I appreciate a journalist willing to dive into something obscure and reveal a lot of interesting process details and anecdotes as they go.

Before I knew anything about the film and TV industry I would have assumed the process was rather straightforward from concept to script to filming and then editing, almost waterfall style.

But no, it typically evolves and lives and changes through the process. Dialog and storylines are tweaked at every stage as the end product is incrementally manifested. Not unlike software development.

When they talked about how the first draft had the correct bird from the correct place making the correct sound, but what made it into production was the wrong bird from the wrong place making the wrong sound, I felt that in my software engineering soul.

The reasons were relatable too - real-world constraints got in the way, and ultimately this bug was way too minor to be fixed, in the face of all the big problems the movie faced.

> you are always birding

Amen, Brother.

I think a large part of the blame for this state of affairs belongs to people like the BBC's Natural History Unit who licence their material to film and TV companies far and wide. So, for example, in many a scene you can thrill to the song of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilis) or Eurasian Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), which would be knee-deep in twitchers if the birds were actually there.

The first few paragraphs pattern match on "I'm going to use some excuse to meander on endlessly about myself, tying back into the nominal title just at the end so it doesn't look like I'm all about me", but it does turn out to just be a framing device and worth continuing past for an interesting story.

You thought this was a story about birds. It's really a story about the film-making process

I really enjoyed reading this.

And it starts with the all-too-familiar "Chesterton's Fence" arrogance of the domain expert who sees something done wrong and presumes that this is due to the ignorance or laziness of the doers, only to learn that there are sensible decisions made by sensible people behind it.

Thank you for giving me the phrase "Chesterton's Fence".

Long needed.

If you like the phrase, you should read https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ to get the full context on what it means.

Long and meandering read, but the excellent bird puns throughout make it worthwhile.

Yes they really do fit the bill!

Some of them were a bit hard to swallow

We’re still raven about how good they were

I read enough to trust that the writer dug very very deep on this. I was thinking early on "oh yea, probably just an error of the script getting to production and then a producer making a call as they switched locations", indeed it was something like that, but the writer here got down to the exact timeline of events, rewrites and script reads involved, etc. Even for someone like myself who is obsessed with BOTH birds and filmmaking, this is getting a little too deep, but I appreciate the effort!

Merlin is a great app for identifying birds (via sound and photo). We've used it in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. The library of sounds is most thorough in North America.

Fun story!

Wasn't this posted here a week or two ago?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Curious%20Case%20of%20th...

9 days ago. So spot on. But it didn't gain any traction then.

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