Hitchcock’s Deranged Birds

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In Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, The Birds, Bodega Bay, California, is inexplicably besieged by crazed birds. After the birds attack and kill several residents, the townspeople flee in terror.

We never find out why the birds became deranged, but research from 2011 does give us food for thought. After a flock of disoriented Sooty Shearwaters swarmed Monterey Bay in 1961, poisoning was suspected.

But when a flock of confused and dying White Pelicans came ashore in the same area in 1991, scientists found evidence of poisoning. In 2011, a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience reported that the pelicans had eaten fish laden with a neurotoxin produced by plankton. These toxins contained -- quote -- "a nerve-damaging acid, which causes confusion, seizures and death in birds."

Maybe Hitchcock's movie isn't so far-fetched after all...

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© 2014 Tune In to Nature.org December 2014 Narrator: Michael Stein