September 29, 2007
"Admittedly a few birds did act strange," explained Sebastian Sholes, a fisherman sitting in a diner in Alfred Hitchcock's movie, 'The Birds', 1963.
Melanie Daniels played by Tippi Hedren disagreed, "I keep telling you, this isn't a few birds! These are gulls, crows, swifts!"
Birds are unpredictable and can fly up out of nowhere when you least expect it just like in Hitchcock's movie 'The Birds'.
I agree with Melanie, heroine of the movie, who was pecked by a gull and chased by a flock of winged creatures into a phone booth.
Birds can give you a terrible shock.
This week while enjoying Chinese mall food (and it was not too bad actually) I noticed a flit out of the side of my eye.
Then another flit.
I was being dive bombed by a bird, and there was no mistaking it.
What was I to do at that point but finish my crab rangoon and shrimp lo mein before I headed for the exit. It was not easy to be so patient, believe me, but the crab rangoon called.
After escaping the 'Return of the Birds' in the mall, I went to the grocery store intent on filling my shopping cart with fresh veggies and such. Instead, once again, I encountered a bird.
Not what I expected to find at the store.
There on the broccoli in the produce section, as big as you please, sat a runt of a bird. He did not move, but I did and fast!
Immediately, I found a store employee to alert him to the fact that a bird was sitting on the fresh produce in the vegetable cooler.
The response, "Yes, we know. We try and get rid of them at night."
I was speechless.
When I got to my car after a hurried escape from the market, I found, to my chagrin, a huge, reddish-purple boysenberry bird excrement splat on my car windshield!
"What is this, what is going on," I thought, "Revenge of the Birds. Planet of the Birds?"
Later in the day, I searched the website IMBD, internet movie database, and found this explanation of the Hitchcock bird movie that apparently is still quite relevant today.
A blogger named Filmfactsman writes, "The movie 'The Birds' is guaranteed to make you want to stop bird-watching and put the old bird feeder to the ax--at least for awhile. The whole thing starts when Melanie Daniels is crossing a lake and is nipped by a gull. Gradually, incidence of bird damage to humans by pecking increases...and finally everyone hides in homes tightly boarded up against repeated attacks by the birds. It is enough to make you kick the next pigeon you come across."
I can only hope that a gaggle of geese does not decide to winter on our lawn.
