The Birds

I never really thought of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" as a scary movie. It was tense, and well-acted and directed, of course, but scary? I never thought so.

My guess is that for a large number of people, birds are not thought of as predators. They are cute and (relatively) small. We see more of them in a parental capacity or sucking nectar from flowers than we do eating flesh, so it is hard to see them as predators. Even when watching an osprey, hawk, or eagle grabbing fish out of the stream, we rarely consider them "predatory" for some reason.

The other day, as I was puttering about the house, I notice a shadow infrequently obstructing the sun shining through the window. After a couple of times, I went and looked to find out what it was. What I saw astounded me.

A flock/gaggle/group/horde of hundreds of ravenous birds, all small and cute, were flying from yard to yard in the neighborhood en masse and devouring thousands of worms, caterpillars, and similar bugs on each lawn. And they weren't nice about it. Sometimes a two birds would grab the same worm and would pull it apart in their frenzy to eat it. They would squeak and squawk at one another, and attempt to drive each other away from the choicest caterpillars.

What surprised and, frankly, scared me the most was how they did all this with near-military precision and as a unit. And they killed and ate more bugs than any chemical bug spray would have taken care of.

I managed to get a few pics of this ravenous horde in progress. As you can see, they strangely respected each yard's boundaries and did one lawn at a time as a group. It was a little eerie.






I'll never look at a group of birds again with quite the same naivety.