In it, a farmhand and his family, as well as the rest of his community, are attacked by seabirds arriving from the east. The story is set in Cornwall, in a seaside village on the southwest coast of England. As for capturing the chaos of birds going crazy everywhere, all of the time? We’d say he got that just right. The Birds is based on a novella of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, which was first published in 1952. Hitchcock’s film was put together before The Curious Case Of The Plummeting Sooty Shearwaters was solved, so didn’t quite contain the more nuanced themes of the true events. Specimens collected around the time of the sooty shearwater debacle revealed that they contained Pseudo-nitzschia microalgae fragments, indicating that, as with the pelicans, domoic acid was likely the culprit.

Symptoms of domoic acid exposure include disorientation, seizures, coma, and death, and it can affect birds and mammals like seals. It is a Gothic horror story about a man who must protect his family from the brutal and inexplicably organized attacks perpetrated by the birds. In this case, the pelicans had eaten many anchovies, which in life had eaten many plankton the plankton were contaminated with the acid, initially at low concentrations, but it built up with each trophic level. Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds was first published in her 1952 collection, The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories. The cause? Domoic acid, a marine biotoxin produced by diatoms of the genus Pseudo-nitzschia, that causes amnesic shellfish poisoning.ĭomoic acid is one of many compounds which can accumulate in the bodies of animals higher up the marine food chain. They were helped along by a similarly perplexing phenomenon whereby a flock of brown pelicans washed ashore exhibiting symptoms similar to those of the shearwaters. As to what went so wrong for the shearwaters, it would take 50 years before scientists would be able to pin down a definitive answer.

The birds daphne