In 1972, married biologists George Hunt and Molly Warner make an unprecedented discovery while studying seagulls on one of California’s Channel Islands.To their surprise, a great number of the nesting pairs they observe are both female. George and Molly’s research on “gay gulls” quickly triggers both outrage and jubilation in a nation grappling with the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Love Birds is a short film about two ambitious young scientists, their love story, and a chance discovery that hurtles them into a cultural and political firestorm. While their work makes an indelible mark on history and impacts generations of LGBTQ+ people, it also sets them on course for a breakup that will take decades to heal. The publication of George and Molly’s study in 1977 makes headlines worldwide. The media coverage ranges from the favorable, to the befuddled, to the downright nasty. Many commentators consider the scientists’ work at best a joke, and at worst a waste of time and taxpayer money. But support from the emergent LGBTQ+ community, bristling for a fight after the Stonewall riots and energized by new leadership, explodes. When the House of Representatives meets the next year to re- authorize the National Science Foundation’s budget, “gay gulls” are on everyone’s mind. The research is singled out for ridicule, and the future of public funding for science seems to hang in the balance. Our story takes us beyond the political drama to a much more intimate one. Young, ambitious researchers, in love and newly married, Molly and George leave behind everything they know to embark on a perilous expedition to a remote, featureless, lonely place in the name of pure research. On Santa Barbara Island off the coast of California, they find the fulfillment of their scientific dreams.But success comes with a cost, straining their relationship to the breaking point, and—ultimately—leading to an agonizing heartache. Guided by beautifully filmed contemporary interviews with George and Molly, and interspersed with thousands of their unpublished Kodachrome slides, Love Birds travels between the 1970s and the present day, from the college campus in Massachusetts where they first met to the island 40 miles off the California coast where they did their work. This story is crucial to tell now, with science still in the crosshairs of our increasingly bitter culture wars. In many ways, America’s political scene today doesn’t look that different than it did in the 1970s. George and Molly’s discovery is more than just a stunning early glimpse into homosexuality in the animal kingdom. It represents a scientific breakaway from the forces of religion and public morality. In the wake of the discovery, science changes sides, giving the LGBTQ+ community a new ally and a sense of hope for the future—even as the AIDS pandemic looms on the horizon.