I have to agree with you!
3 Likes
I make a special point of nerding out aggressively for people who clearly think my interests are wierd.
Also great for getting rid of tedious people at social gatherings.
The TV/movie thing is so bad. My father-in-law likes to watch golf on the tube. The broadcasters dub bird sounds over the sound to create an ambience but they can’t be bothered to dub birds that actually exist in the location where they’re broadcasting. I like kibbitzing with him while he watches but the sound of Carolina wrens in Hawaii/Scotland/wherever drives me nuts.
6 Likes
Hi
Oh YES!!! I do this all the time. The absolute rubbish that sometimes passes by in films or series is incredible but will probably go unnoticed by most viewers. When it really annoys me is when it is in programs with a scientific presence or films/series where a so called scientist is explaining something that the public is supposed to find fascinating but is in fact not correct.
I also, like you, tend to notice random birds or plants in the background and even wondered if it would be fun to turn them into records. Apart from the logistics there is of course your valid point that they may not really be in the place that the tv program wants us to believe it is.
3 Likes
Just how did Coast Redwoods colonize the Moon of Endor?
7 Likes
I often do this with reptiles/insects that are shown! It does unfortunately tend to take me out of sci-fi when common earth species are included.
2 Likes
This drives me crazy. All the commercials using that one red-tail hawk audio file over and over. I think somehow the hawks should be getting paid not just the person who captured it.
2 Likes
And kookaburra calls heard in every jungle scene anywhere.
5 Likes
I remember whatching an episode of Lost in Space (the very old version) where there were these giant reptilian monsters which escaped from an alien spaceship, only they looked suspiciously like iguanas photographed with the human characters in the background so they looked smaller 
.
2 Likes
Convergent evolution is rampant throughout the galaxy, at least for plants
3 Likes
I have noticed that so much! I do feel like every single jungle scene has that call!
Not really an ID thing, but I love the Coen Brothers and I love True Grit. However, its depiction of rattlesnake behavior (which I won’t spoil) is utterly ridiculous. Grr.
On a slightly different note, one of my high school English/Film teachers was David McCullough, Jr., whose father is easily one of the most famous US historians of the 20th century. He said watching any historcial movie with his father was rough.
5 Likes
I don’t pay that much attention to tv (although the flora/landscapes in the new Lost in Space are much too obviously Earthly), but I was really annoyed when the main character of a mystery novel - who was supposed to be a botanist - got scratched by the thorns of a rhododendron. Yeah, they’re scratchy, but not thorny!
2 Likes
Yes. An author of mystery stories has a background as a ranger or something and should know enough to get the biology right, but in every book (at least every one I read) some seriously incorrect information about nature played an important role. I just don’t read her books any more.
1 Like
You have reminded me of a book I read recently where a character who should have known better said she wanted to travel to Namibia to stand in the shade of a 1000-yr-old Welwitschia. She would have had to be pretty small!
For those unfamiliar with the plant: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/53821-Welwitschia-mirabilis
2 Likes
I always notice animals where they shouldn’t be, or behaving wrong- loons where there shouldn’t be, excessive tarantulas in empty caves, the pit of snakes from that one Indiana Jones movie that were specifically referred to as “asps” (some of them were legless lizards), and the eels from Dial of Destiny. And I swear I saw a monitor lizard in a Star Wars movie once
2 Likes
I believe you were talking about the Star Wars scene where Luke Skywalker is confronting his possible future self on Dagaba ( I think that’s how it’s spelled). They were definitely monitor lizards! 
1 Like
I read one once where the hero and heroine put the villain to sleep with curare. Completely ruined the story for me.
1 Like