The rain of birds slamming against their homes
She knew it was the end of the world, panic set in, sure it was germ warfare
Alfred Hitchcock had a hit with Rebecca. His first American production received 11 Oscar nominations, winning two, including Best Picture. A reason to celebrate, certainly, as the filmmaker and his wife purchased a 200-acre second home nicknamed the "Heart o' the Mountains.”
The Scotts Valley, California estate sat among the central coast redwoods, with a view overlooking the Monterey Bay. Boasting a vineyard and a lovingly-stocked wine cellar, it served as a second home for the couple and a respite away from the world of Hollywood.
It was here the director began work on a film based on a 1957 short horror story by English author, Daphne du Maurier. Inspired by the sight of a local farmer attacked by a flock of angry seagulls while plowing a field, the author set the work in her hometown of Cornwall shortly after the Second World War.
Tasked with adapting the story, crime novelist mainstay and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine alum Evan Hunter took a number of liberties. Among them, the setting was moved to the director’s adopted home of California, much to du Maurier’s chagrin. Hunter and Hitchcock collaborated closely on the story’s development, and in August 1961, the latter phoned the offices of The Santa Cruz Sentinel upon discovering a bizarre local story on the paper’s front page.
Headlined, “Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes,” the piece failed to arrive at a convincing conclusion about the early morning event.
“[A] massive flight of sooty s Capitola and Opal Cliffs, fresh from a feast of anchovies, collided with shoreside structures from Pleasure Point to Rio del Mar during the night,” the article explains. “Residents, especially in the Pleasure Point and Capitola area, were awakened about 3 a.m. today by the rain of birds slamming against their homes. Dead and stunned seabirds littered the streets and roads in the foggy, early dawn. Startled by the invasion, residents rushed out on their lawns with flashlights, then rushed back inside, as the birds flew toward their light.”
Residents described a strange and seemingly unprecedented frenzy of the normally docile birds. They slammed in builds and collided with moving cars, often regurgitating the contents of their stomachs in the process. The birds screamed high-pitched cries as eight people reported having been bitten.
“Struggling to the door, I was awed at the sight of hundreds of birds—all with the cry of a baby,”Edna Messini, owner of Capitola's Venetian Court Motel, wrote of the incident. “They were heavy with sardines unable to fly and lost in the dense fog as they came in from the sea attracted by our lights. They slammed against the building, [regurgitating] fish blood and knocking themselves out. Our manager phoned me, asked what to do? She knew it was the end of the world, panic set in, sure it was germ warfare.”
By the time dawn broke, they were nearly all dead. Thousands of birds lined the streets of the Monterey Bay Area, primarily in the towns of Capitola and Opal Cliffs. The sanitation department loaded up trucks full of shearwater bodies coated in freshly digested anchovy puree.
Amid the confusion and gore, the paper credited the “most learned explanation” to Ward Russell. "They probably became confused and lost and headed for the light," the zoologist told the paper. “The only light available was the street lights and overnight lights in some homes and businesses.”
Local fog, too, took its share of the blame. In fact, the explanation made its way into the final film. “Mrs. Bundy, you said something about Santa Cruz,” the male lead tells a local ornithologist. “About seagulls getting lost in the fog, and heading in for the lights.”
It would be a number of decades before scientists believed they had pinpointed the true culprit: bad algae. "It looks like attacking,” oceanographer Sibel Bargu would say of the discovery, “but it's actually crashing into walls, because they are very disoriented.”
Sources:
This Hitchcock movie was inspired by crab toxin frenzy in Capitola
Here’s the real story behind Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’
https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/wild-lives-hitchcock-birds/
Blame Hitchcock's Crazed Birds on Toxic Algae
https://www.livescience.com/17713-hitchcock-birds-movie-algae-toxin.html