Alfred Hitchcock movies and television shows use to scare the daylights out of me. Some of the fears I felt watching The Birds, a movie he directed in the 1960s, still linger today.
Called the Master of Suspense, Hitchcock directed more than 50 motion pictures that were usually tagged as horror, suspense or thriller films.
He also had a weekly television series back then of short stories with surprise, spine-tingling endings that made it hard to sleep after watching the shows.
What brought this to mind was a recent news story in a national publication about the growing number of attacks on people by red-winged blackbirds.
A man who jogs every day in Minnesota posted on Facebook that he has been repeatedly ambushed by blackbirds during those exercise sessions.
There were immediate responses on social media from a dozen other folks in that area who said red-winged blackbirds had also divebombed them lately.
An official with the Illinois Audubon Society says blackbirds have started harassing her when she is cycling, and people in other states are reporting blackbird assaults.
Environmental experts say the birds are reacting to the increasing encroachment by humans on their habitats.
Maybe Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of premonition about all this when he did the movie about violent bird rampages.
Hitchcock had shocked moviegoers a few years earlier with the film Psycho. The scene where Anthony Perkins slashes Janet Leigh to death in the shower was horrifying. Folks all over the country quit taking showers.
But Birds was even scarier to me than Psycho. Gulls, sparrows and other birds attack and kill people for no reason in the movie. Those images pop into my mind when birds come a little too close.
Years back, a woodpecker started waking me up every morning hammering at metal gutters on the house. When I would try to run him off, he soared at my head. His wings hit me a couple of times.
After a while, he started swooping at me even when I was not trying to scare him away. When I went to the car in the mornings to go to work, he would zoom around my head.
I borrowed a football helmet from a coach at the university and started wearing it going back and forth to the car. Neighbors started looking at me funny.
My journalist friend Bill Carter didn’t understand my fear of birds. He had a pet parrot that he said could talk. It made screeching sounds and Carter would tell me what it said.
Carter knew the bird made me nervous. The bird sat on his shoulder, and he fed it bread. He wanted me to feed the bird to get it to warm up to me. It bit my finger and wouldn’t let go for a while.
I had a big boxer dog for years who chased raccoons, possums and other varmints but was afraid of birds. When mockingbirds dived at him, he would roll over on his back and play dead.
Regina loves birds. She inherited that trait from her mother. We have a big birdhouse in the back yard for purple martins and other birds that use it when the martins leave for the winter.
A smaller birdhouse attracts bluebirds, and there are feeders around the yard for doves, redbirds, sparrows and assorted other birds that fight off squirrels for the food.
She spends a fortune on birdseed. Doves that seem to get bigger every year hang out under the feeders and scoop up food other birds knock out of the containers.
Regina told me the other day we had the biggest doves she had ever seen under the feeders. It turned out to be a bunch of ducks that came across the back yard from Cane River.
We see them in the river all the time, but they had never raided the bird feeders. The birdseed bill will be going up.
Regina loves to sit on the patio and watch the birds. I do too as long as it’s from a distance. They make a lot of noise, but I have not been able to make out what they are saying like Bill Carter did.
The purple martins swoop down at me when I mow beneath their house. It makes me think of the Birds movie. I still have the football helmet in case I need it.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES