The birds swarm over Capitola.
Thousands of frenzied birds invade a small, coastal California town, slamming into houses, destroying property, and terrorizing the locals. Sounds like the storyline for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror classic, The Birds, yes? Actually, no…not the one I’m writing about here. It happened for real in 1961. Where? In a small, coastal California town named Capitola.
THE END OF THE WORLD?
Capitola, current population a bit over 9,000 people, is located on the north shore of Monterey Bay. A popular beach town, it welcomes tourists pretty much year-round. It also plays host to summertime visitors: sea birds known as sooty shearwaters, similar to gulls. As many as a million of them arrive each year to feed on anchovies and squid in the bay. They mostly stay offshore and are no bother to anyone.
Sooty shearwaters like this one were the perpetrators.
But all of that changed in the wee hours of the morning on August 18th, 1961. A cop out on patrol in the town’s typical A.M. fog had his vehicle pelted by numerous charcoal-colored birds. They damaged his patrol car, and for a while he was trapped inside.
From there, it escalated into a full-blown assault on Capitola as tens of thousands of disoriented birds slammed into houses and guest cottages, hit lampposts and power lines, and anything else in their way before many of them fell to the ground, dead. Residents, awakened by the attack, emerged from their homes to see what was happening, and many were injured by the swarming creatures.
Dead and dying birds began piling up on the streets. Unable to fly, many of them staggered through the town, nipping at residents and tourists. They also barfed up undigested fish, causing an unbelievable stench. A motel manager was quoted as saying, “It’s the end of the world!” (If you’re familiar with The Birds, you heard that line spoken multiple times during the restaurant scene.)
The assault all but ended by midmorning, the sooty shearwaters either having flown off, or put out into the bay—or died. The town, and miles of beaches, were littered with their remains. The whole town came forward to clean up the stinking mess, filling up numerous garbage cans with dead birds.
“GOOD EVENING, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN”
By sheer coincidence, Alfred Hitchcock owned a home in nearby Scotts Valley. He was often seen walking his dogs on Capitola’s beaches. At the time of the attack he happened to be in Hollywood, developing a script for his next movie. He had just purchased the rights to a novella by Daphne du Maurier titled, The Birds. When he learned about the attack in Capitola, he researched as many details as he could. Similar scenes abounded in his subsequent 1963 horror classic.
An awesome scene from The Birds.
Those residents of Capitola who had lived through the assault of the sooty shearwaters were quite shaken by scenes in the film of birds dive-bombing on people, swarming down a chimney, and bashing into a phone booth. One man commented, “Everybody who was down there that morning probably flashed back on it.”
WHAT CAUSED THE BIRD ATTACK?
Speculation abounded for decades as to what caused the Capitola incident. Finally, in 1991, the answer began to present itself when numerous pelicans and cormorants on the north side of Monterey Bay suddenly died. Research found that the birds had eaten anchovies laced with domoic acid, a naturally occurring poison produced by plankton, which becomes more concentrated as it moves up the food chain, causing seizures, disorientation, and ultimately death. Subsequent studies proved that the plankton in Monterey Bay during the summer of 1961 was 79 percent toxic. Case closed.
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds has been one of my all-time favorite movies from the time I was a mere slip of a lad. But until now I did not know that it was “based on a true story.”