On Wed, 3 Sep 1997, John Leonard wrote:
> I remember reading somewhere that the inspiration for Hitchcock's film
> ... Can anyone confirm/clarify/amplify this story?
A quick web search turns up a story in Discover magazine November 1995.
Andrew
>From http://www.dc.enews.com/magazines/discover/magtxt/110195-1.html
HORROR - The Birds II
In September 1991 the pelicans and Brandt's cormorants that live off the
coast of Santa Cruz, California, went berserk: they flopped their heads
around and flipped over onto their backs, swam erratically, and vomited.
More than 100 of them died. What was tormenting the birds? Biologists from
the University of California at Santa Cruz have found the source of the
poison: a species of marine plankton called Pseudo-nitzschia australis.
In August 1961 another bout of bizarre bird behavior--probably due to the
same plankter--took place in the Santa Cruz area, this time involving a
seabird called the sooty shearwater. Shearwaters, according to local
newspaper reports, banged into buildings and streetlights, "cried like
babies," and bit residents. If all this sounds eerily similar to Alfred
Hitchcock's The Birds, it should. Hitchcock was reportedly inspired by the
incident.
The birds' stomachs in the recent case were found to be full of
anchovies--and a toxin called domoic acid, first described in 1987 by
Canadian researchers. Domoic acid attacks nerve cells in the brain, says
David Garrison, a U.C. Santa Cruz biologist, and it works much like the
flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG). "When it gets into the
bloodstream and crosses the blood-brain barrier, it binds to nerve cells,"
says Garrison. "MSG will do this, and give some people headaches. But this
is a very strong compound. It essentially excites the nerve cells until
they are killed."
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