CROWS REMINISCENT OF HITCHCOCK’S ‘THE BIRDS’
A murder of crows descending on a leafless persimmon tree on Laurel Street in Santa Cruz can remind us of the local connection to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, “The Birds.” Although the film is set in Bodega Bay, it’s genesis can be traced back to an incident in Capitola that intrigued Hitchcock, a part-time Scotts Valley resident. According to reporting in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, on Aug.18, 1961, “a massive flight of sooty shearwaters, fresh from a feast of anchovies, collided with shoreside structures from Pleasure Point to Rio del Mar during the night. Residents, especially in the Pleasure Point and Capitola area, were awakened about 3 a.m. today by the rain of birds slamming against their homes. Dead and stunned seabirds littered the streets and roads in the foggy, early dawn. Startled by the invasion, residents rushed out on their lawns with flashlights, then rushed back inside, as the birds flew toward their light.” The cause of the incident remained a mystery for three decades until UC Santa Cruz marine biologist David Garrison studied a similar 1991 incident and speculated that domoic acid that the birds had ingested might have been responsible for the 1961 bird invasion. It wasn’t until 2012, more than half a century after the episode, that researchers from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography found direct evidence that the sooty shearwaters had indeed suffered domoic acid poisoning.