Mystery of "The Birds" Solved

I had known (from what source, I don't remember) that the movie, "The Birds," was based on an actual account of seagulls attacking a small California town. Now, a news story with some background on the incident and a possible answer:

The bizarre event which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic masterpiece The Birds has finally been explained.

The director was said to have based the 1963 film on a creepy incident in California, where flocks of frenzied, dying birds flew into the windows of homes in Monterey Bay.

Scientists have come up with an answer for the freak of nature - that the birds had been poisoned by toxic plankton.

'I am pretty convinced that the birds were poisoned,' said ocean environmentalist Sibel Bargu of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge to USA Today.

The scientists came up with the theory after studying the stomach contents of marine life from the time of the birds' deaths in 1961. They discovered toxic algae on three-quarters of the plankton the birds ate which damaged nerves - causing seizures, disorientation and finally, death.

The algae were believed to have become poisonous after being infected from leaky septic tanks, installed quickly during the housing boom in the Sixties across California.

At the time, police officer Ed Cunningham had been on patrol when a deluge of dead birds began to land on his squad car at around 2:30 am.

The officer told the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1961: 'By the time I had stopped the car they were raining down all around me.

'They were big birds and they were falling so fast and hard they could have knocked me senseless. I thought I had better stay in the car and that's just what I did.'

(Full story here).