by Ian Harding
When I first started out on Pretty Little Liars, it was even more difficult than usual for me to watch myself. I’d watch new episodes but would find myself squirming when I came on-screen. Occasionally, I got so uncomfortable that I’d have to turn off the TV. Eventually, I stopped watching altogether.
But I really wanted to get better, and I recently happened upon a solution: Italian dubbing.
Turns out, I have absolutely no problem watching myself on-screen as long as I am watching the dubbed version of my show that airs in Italy. The guy whose voice they use for mine is named Francesco Venditti, and his voice is—well, it’s just goddamn poetry to listen to. I don’t understand Italian, but it’s so much nicer than listening to my own voice.
We’ve never met, but Francesco has helped me get over the discomfort I used to feel watching myself on-screen. He’s been like a plastic bag over the side-view mirror for me. Finally, I can relax and enjoy the show.
DEATH AND LOONS
A lot of people get killed on Pretty Little Liars—it’s just that kind of show.
Funeral scenes are some of my favorite to shoot. There are one or two each season, and they usually involve most of the regular cast. The scenes when we’re all working together are sort of like cast reunions. The mood on set is even more lighthearted than usual.
A lot of the funeral scenes are filmed in a little white chapel on the Warner Bros. back lot in Burbank. It’s not an actual chapel: it’s only ever used for filming. You can see the same exterior and interior of the building in just about every season. It pops up at the end of season one, for example, when Spencer’s brother-in-law Ian Thomas tries to push her off the bell tower.
We actually film almost all of the show on the Warner Bros. lot, and there are a handful of houses and buildings that provide nearly all of the exterior shots. You may recognize some of the same buildings on Gilmore Girls or Heart of Dixie—they’re regularly repurposed for different projects.
There’s a courthouse and a fire department, which are two sides of the same building. There are wooded areas for when the girls have to run for their lives through a forest. Some of the trees are real, some are made of plastic.
There’s an art museum—or at least the façade of one—where I take Aria on our first real date on the show in season one … in a limousine.
Yes, a limo. On a high school teacher’s salary.
A few seasons back, the building that was Toby’s house got real-life termites. It had to be torn down, so the writers came up with the idea to have “A”—the show’s unremitting and anonymous villain—blow it up. I was there for the explosion—and, for the record, it was awesome.
The only thing we don’t have on the lot, which you’d think would be useful for a show like ours, is a good cemetery. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons why Warner Bros. doesn’t have a cemetery on the lot, but with so many people dying on PLL, once in a blue moon we have to leave set to film in a real one.
When you see tombstones on the show, they’re usually real.
In season one, for instance, we filmed Ian Thomas’s burial at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, about an hour east of the Warner Bros. lot.
I understand that sometimes you have to travel to get the right shot, and that sometimes certain locations are off-limits or prohibitively expensive to shoot at. It’s still a bit funny to me, though, that we drove an hour off the lot to shoot in a cemetery—because there’s another one directly across the street from Warner Bros.
Forest Lawn–Hollywood Hills is a beautiful sight. The cemetery is made up of rolling green hills dotted with towering pine trees, and lush green lawns are manicured to a golf course level of precision.
Once, a few years back, I went to see Torrey DeVitto, who plays Melissa on the show, play violin with the Burbank Philharmonic at a performance space there. Before the concert, I took a stroll through the tombstones. Looking up, I saw a small flock of white-throated swifts far overhead, riding the wind gusting over the mountains of Griffith Park, which the cemetery backs up to.
Dying is big business in Southern California, and I’ve seen Forest Lawn advertisements at Dodger Stadium during baseball games, and there’s even a Forest Lawn kiosk at the Glendale Galleria mall—it’s right above the food court.
There are six Forest Lawn cemeteries in Los Angeles. I drive by two of them just on my way to work. There’s Forest Lawn–Hollywood Hills, of course, the one directly across the street from Warner Bros., and then there’s Forest Lawn–Memorial Park, which is nestled on a quiet hilltop at the southern edge of Glendale.
I’ve been over to Forest Lawn–Memorial Park a few times. Long, winding roads cut through the graveyard, making their way slowly up the hill. The higher you drive, the more expansive the views of the city become. At the top, there’s a gorgeous panoramic vista: Glendale to the east, with Pasadena beyond it; the Los Angeles River to the west; the City of Burbank to the north; and the skyscrapers of downtown just on the horizon to the south.
There’s a massive auditorium up at the top, with a 195-foot-long painting of the crucifixion. Next door, in the auditorium’s shadow, is a museum. The front half has rotating exhibits, usually contemporary work with a focus on Hollywood. The back half is where they keep the permanent collection—a seemingly disconnected array of artifacts and treasures. You half expect to find a piece of the One True Cross stashed away between the gold chainmail and the paintings of duchess’s dogs. It’s like a conquistador’s messy garage.
I really like spending time at Forest Lawn. Cemeteries can be peaceful, even pleasant, and I don’t mean that in a creepy, Edgar Allan Poe–ish way. I don’t go over to Forest Lawn to pay my respects, or commune with the dead, or anything like that. There aren’t specific gravestones I visit, though it’s always fun to see all the weird last names people have. I also don’t go to visit the celebrities buried there, of which there are many—Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Michael Jackson.
I go because there’s great birding in cemeteries.
Seriously. In big cities, cemeteries are often some of the best places to find birds. Cemeteries are acres of land unobstructed by buildings or other major human development. They’re a lot like parks: well-maintained trees, shrubbery, and expansive grass lawns—perfect for birds.
I don’t think I would have ever thought to try birding in a cemetery if I hadn’t read about it online. The first time I went to a cemetery to look at birds, it was because of a rare-bird alert. A group of birders had seen a scissor-tailed flycatcher in a cemetery in Santa Monica, and they posted about it on an online forum.
Birding is a solitary hobby. You spend most of your time alone in nature, looking and listening intently to the world around you. There are some birding groups, but for the most part birders keep to themselves.
That all changes when there’s a rare-bird alert—they’re the ice cream socials of the birding world. Birders come out in droves to see rare birds when they’ve strayed far from their normal range. Everybody drops what they’re doing and hops in their cars and races over to the spot of the last sighting.
I subscribe to a forum that people post on whenever they see rare or unusual birds in Los Angeles. I only learned about it a couple of years ago, and since then, I’ve been spending way too much time checking for updates. Maybe once or twice a day, somebody will see something unusual and report in. Sometimes it will be a rare-bird alert, sometimes it will be a woman in Hollywood asking for advice on how to get a snowy egret to stop eating the house finches in her yard. Either way, the online forums are an incredible tool.
Birders move in flocks when they get together. A rare-bird alert will go out, saying that an unusual bird has been spotted that morning at such-and-such location. A good alert will be followed by a flurry of confirmations from individuals. Then everybody loads their gear into their cars and drives, all the while dangerously checking their phones for updates, to the site of the last spotting. Once they arrive, the birders gather into a tight huddle, craning
their necks this way and that to see if anyone can spot anything. For a while, nothing will happen.
Then, after ten or fifteen minutes, a lone scout on the other side of the park will shout that they’ve spotted the lazuli bunting or whatever bird it is that day, and the group will clatter together loudly across the park in pursuit. Thirty or forty birders zigzagging about in a binoculared pack. This mass of bodies will inevitably scare the bird away, so by the time the group arrives by the scout’s side, the bird will have moved on.
A few years back, I think it was in May, an alert went out that an arctic loon had become stranded in a small town just east of Los Angeles. I expected it to stick around for only a few days, but it was still there in July, and I decided to go find it.
To be clear, arctic loons have no business being in Southern California. It’s exciting news when they fly as far south as British Columbia. They have evolved to survive in extremely cold climates—their genetic makeup designed to flourish in the icy tundra of western Siberia, not the rowdy strip malls of West Covina.
The arctic loon had been spotted in a place called Puddingstone Lake. I drove out there one day to try and see it.
Walking around, I passed more barbecues than you’d see in a whole summer of Fourth of Julys. Super-cool lifeguards sat perched at intervals all along the shore.
I pulled out my binoculars to see if the loon might be out on the water. I surveyed the lake. All I could see were mallards and people swimming. Babies bobbed up and down, overinflated floaties manacled to their pudgy little arms. A middle-school boy was trying to convince his girlfriend there were eels in the water. It was exactly what you would expect from a place called Puddingstone Lake: just the cutest stuff imaginable.
I put the binoculars away and decided to walk along the shore to see if I could catch a glimpse of the loon a little farther down.
About half a mile on, I passed a swimming hole where eight or ten kids were splashing around. It was significantly less crowded than the beach I had just left. There was a bored-looking lifeguard sitting up high on his stand.
I wasn’t having any luck spotting this arctic loon, and even though I didn’t expect anyone else to care about it, I tried my luck and asked him if he’d seen any strange-looking birds out on the water that morning.
“You mean the arctic loon?” he said, his eyes invisible behind his mirrored aviators.
“I, uh, yeah. You know about that?” I stammered.
“Of course, dude. Loon’s been here for like a month. It’s a pretty chill little bird.”
“Do you know where it might be today?”
“I think he’s over by Sailboat Cove right now.”
“That’s not a real place,” I said.
He shrugged. “I didn’t name it.”
Sure enough, about a hundred yards off from a dock with sailboats near it, which I assumed was Sailboat Cove, I saw it: the arctic loon, sitting out on the water.
It looked really lost.
It disappeared underwater briefly, popping back up a few yards away from where it had been swimming. I imagined it was trying to stay as cool as possible given how hot it was outside.
I associate loons so strongly with their call, and just watching the bird, I began to imagine its plaintive wail.
Every summer, my family goes up to New England for a couple of weeks. There’s a lake we go to, and visiting it is almost a religious experience for me. The lake is filled with loons—hundreds of them. If you stand on the shore at dusk and listen, the place sounds haunted.
My aunt Jules loves loons. When the family arrives at the lake, before we even unpack the car, she will walk solemnly to the shore and stand completely still, staring out at the loons on the water. She’ll stand like that for about ten minutes, then will give the lake a slight nod and return to the car to carry in the rest of the luggage. Other than Saint Peter’s Basilica, I’ve never seen anything else give my aunt pause like that. She is a ball of energy—frantic, kind, and opinionated. But the loons silence her.
As I stood there now, not at the lake from my childhood but on a shore in San Dimas, staring at a totally different species of loon from the ones I’d grown up with, something occurred to me.
Many rare bird sightings only happen when something has gone wrong. Whether blown off course or just extremely lost, somehow an individual bird becomes separated from its flock and finds itself thousands of miles away from home. The land is unfamiliar, the climate sometimes deadly.
When an arctic loon gets lost in a lake in Southern California, it’s hard to imagine it’s ever going to make it back home to the icy north. And if it doesn’t, it’s likely going to die. So, in a case like this, the rare bird alert that went out for the loon was also, in a sense, its obituary. It’s sad—seeing this magnificent bird and knowing that it probably only has a short while left to live.
There was a voice in my head that told me to respond to this tragedy the way we respond to so many others: to take a picture with my phone and drive home.
But something felt wrong about that approach. Maybe it was that tourism didn’t feel like an appropriate response to death. Whatever it was, I didn’t feel comfortable standing there and watching a lost animal float helplessly on the waves of a lake that would soon envelop it.
I wanted to swim out and grab the loon, stash it in a suitcase, and fly it up north, as far north as we could go before my fingers froze solid. Then I would fling open my suitcase and shout, “You’re free, loon! Free to spend your days swimming in the icy waters of the north!”
But conservation doesn’t work like that. In the movies, when you go with your gut, everything turns out okay. You can just go and save the day because it’s obvious to everyone around you that what you’re doing is inherently the right thing to do.
In the real world there’s paperwork, borders, agricultural restrictions, holding periods, smuggling laws. There are ecological standards and conservation rules that change from nation to nation. Ornithologists—and even lifeguards—knew that the bird was there on Puddingstone Lake, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Sometimes, the best thing to do with nature is to leave it alone.
Driving away from the lake, I kept thinking about it.
As I got on to the highway, I passed another Forest Lawn cemetery—turns out they have one in Covina, right next to the lake.
It occurred to me, as I looked out my window, that the last few times I’d been to a cemetery, it’d been for a concert or to film the show or to wander around and look at birds. I’d been to a graveyard a couple of times that year, and it’d always been fun.
Getting to see the loon had felt like a funeral.
SPRING MIGRATION
One of the great things about birding is that you can do it anywhere in the world.
In Paris for a fan convention? Head over to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, visit the graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, and see what birds you can find in the trees overhead. Or maybe you’re in New York City for a press junket. Easy. Take an afternoon and go try to find Pale Male, a famous red-tailed hawk that lives on the Upper East Side, named for his pale face.
You can tack birding on to any normal trip with the simple addition of binoculars.
Or, you can go all out. Once, on a trip to Seattle with Sophia for a wedding, I hired a birding guide for a morning. We were out in a marsh, and the guide played a recording of a Virginia rail on a handheld speaker. A little shadow picked its way through a thicket of reeds, was in view for about five seconds or so, and then silently vanished back into the dense stalks. Spotting a Virginia rail hadn’t been the point of the trip—they’re usually next to impossible to see—but, like I said before, birds are everywhere.
I’d gotten back into birding a few years earlier on the trip to Big Bear, but as of the sixth season of the show, I’d never been on a trip outside of Los Angeles specifically to see birds. I was daunted by the idea.
Sure, I’d look at birds while out walking the dogs. Or I�
��d go on hikes with friends and wander off when I saw something interesting. On weekends, I’d drive out to the Ballona Wetlands, just north of LAX in Marina del Rey, to see what I could find. There’s a path along a swamp there, and you can usually see ducks and herons. In the near distance, double-decker Airbuses take off, on their way to distant shores.
I’d been treating birding as an excuse to get away from work. It was a reason to get outside, not a reason to get on one of those planes.
Last year I decided to go someplace new with the sole purpose of birding my face off. This was big for me. It was springtime: time for new growth, new life. Birds were in the air.
Seriously, birds were in the air. A lot of them. Every spring, millions of birds migrate up from Central and South America to their summer breeding grounds in North America. There are a couple of prime spots to see them, natural bottlenecks on the migration paths, where the chances of seeing normally hard-to-find species are pretty good.
So I pulled the trigger: I booked a flight to Houston.
About an hour and a half east of the city, there’s a small bump in the land on the coast—just a little rise, caused by a salt dome that got squeezed up from below the earth’s surface. It’s a geological pimple. High Island, as it’s called, is the highest natural coastal feature from the Yucatán to Alabama. It’s a whopping thirty-eight feet above sea level.
That may not sound special, but it is. Imagine you’ve been stranded at sea for a few days, and you finally spot land on the horizon. Even if that land was Trenton, New Jersey, you’d be excited.
That’s what High Island is like for birds. Because it’s slightly higher than the surrounding coastal prairie, it’s the first speck of mainland that a lot of birds see as they make their way over six hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico. And once they reach High Island, there’s plentiful water and food and trees to rest in. Migrating birds stop here by the thousands in the spring to rest and refuel before continuing their journey northward.
