THIS. HAPPENED. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic THE BIRDS is, in part, inspired by a very real phenomenon that occurred in Santa Cruz, California in 1961. One night, inexplicably, thousands of sooty shearwater birds lost their minds, dive-bombing into homes and even biting people. But, for 50 years, no one knew why… That is, until Dr. Sibel Bargu Ates connected dots throughout history through meticulous (and rather imaginative) archive specimen research. This is a Hitchcockian mystery wrapped in a scientific paper—a biological whodunnit.

Also, in this video: we uncover a horrifying first hand account of the true-life bird invasion (which overlaps in a way with another Hitchcock film, PSYCHO). And, learn how birds flock and move together. In fact, a 1986 computer program helped solve the puzzle of how they actually fly so close without every bird in a flock ricocheting off each other like pinballs.

Said another way, this is a story all about bird brains.

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ABOUT WILD LIVES
Popular Science’s WILD LIVES is a monthly series that dives like an Emperor penguin into some of the wildest stories and weirdest facts about, of course, wild animals. In their own words. Well, approximately their own words—they are wild animals after all.

CREDITS
Video by: Tom McNamara
Animation: Beth Wexler
Narrator: Elizabeth Ollier
Executive Producer: Amy Schellenbaum
Editor-in-Chief: Corinne Iozzio

Media
1961 Santa Cruz Sentinel bird invasion photos (courtesy Covello & Covello Photography), Archival gut contents image (2012, Nature Geoscience), “Birds of America” (1917, The University Society), Boids program (1986, courtesy Craig Reynolds), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920, Paramount film), Dr. Sibel Bargu Ates, “Gull Island” and “Inishvickillane, Blasket Islands” footage (1942, 1925, Chicago Academy of Sciences), Internet Archives, Mixed zooplankton sample (2019, Adriana Zingone, Domenico D’Alelio, Maria Grazia Mazzocchi, Marina Montresor, Diana Sarno, LTER-MC team), Oral history by Edna Messini (courtesy Capitola Historical Museum, Frank Perry), Pond5, Prelinger Archives, Pseudo-Nitzschia specimen images (NOAA/NWFSC), Santa Cruz Sentinel, “The Birds” (1963, Universal Pictures), “The Vanishing Lady” (1896, Georges Méliès)

Music
APM, Vik Sharma

Thank You
Dr. Sibel Bargu Ates (Louisiana State University, College of the Coast & Environment, Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences), Shmuel Thaler (Staff Photographer, Santa Cruz Sentinel), Dr. Cheryl Baduini (Claremont), Frank Perry (Curator, Capitola Historical Museum), Georgia Chronopoulos (Covello & Covello Photography), Wyatt Young (Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Frank Gravier (Reference Librarian, Special Collections & Archives, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz), Erin Chapman, Josh Engel (Red Hill Birding), Jack Furtado