"The Birds" is a famous novelette by Daphne du Maurier, first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree, and reprinted in the 1963 collection The Birds and Other Stories. It is the story of a part-time farmhand, Nat Hocken, his wife and children Jill and Johnny, as a massive number of birds begin attacking them and presumably the whole of Europe. It is set in Britain, probably at the Cornish coast shortly after the end of World War II, and is thought to have been inspired by the author watching a man ploughing his field, while some seagulls were wheeling and diving above him; Du Maurier developed the idea of these birds becoming hostile and attacking. The east wind which, it is implied, is connected to the birds' attack is a possible reference to the threat of Communism and the Cold War in which the USA and UK were embroiled in the 1950s and 1960s.
The story was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name.
Plot summary
Nat Hocken notices an unusual number of birds flying about and behaving strangely along the Peninsula where his family and few others live. They assume this strange behavior has to do with the approaching cold weather. One night, Nat hears tapping in his bedroom window, and when he opens the window to check, he is assaulted by a frightened bird. After a while, the tapping continues, and as he opens the window again, a number of birds strike him and disappear. He then hears screams in the children's room, and rushes to them, only to find hundreds of small birds flying savagely inside. He tries to fight them with a blanket for an undefined amount of time, and when dawn arrives they fly away, except for about fifty of them who lie in the floor dead from crashing against the things in the room and from Nat's attacking. Nat tells the terrified children the birds were only hungry and cold. Jill suggests that if they put bread outside, they'll eat it and go away. The children soon forget the incident.
The next day the weather has completely changed, with a cold, hard east wind and frost. Autumn has rapidly changed into black winter in the preceding night. Nat trips and falls and walks Jill to the bus stop but tells his fellow workers on the Trigg's land about the night's events, but they give it little importance, saying they were only hungry, and the sudden change of weather had stirred them up. As he goes to the beach to dispose of the dead birds' carcasses, he notices over the sea what looks like dark clouds near the coast, but which he soon realizes are tens of thousands of seagulls waiting for the tide to rise. When he gets home, he and his family can hear over the radio that birds are attacking London and many other places in Britain. Nat decides to board the windows up. His wife cannot make sense of what he was doing ("You think they would break in, with the windows shut?"). However he continues to work, not wanting to alarm his wife. After he picks up Jill from the school bus stop, they have to run home. Trigg arrives and offers to give Jill a lift home. He cheerfully claims that Jim (the cowman) and he are unfazed by the announcements and want to have a "shooting match". Nat rejects Trigg's offer to get him a gun and "make the feathers fly" and continues home. Just before he reaches home, the gulls start descending, attacking him, frenziedly stabbing and jabbing with their beaks. Nat barely makes it home -- he is almost killed by a gannet at the doorway.
Soon massive swarms of birds are diving for the house. A national emergency is declared on the radio. Nat is nervous but tries to hide his anxiety from the children and his wife. Many birds crash mindlessly against the house as Nat plans how to survive for a the next few days inside the house while someone brings help. If help will arrive, that is ("Each householder must look after his own").
After they hear several planes crash down as the gulls inevitably strike them down, the noise of the birds recedes, as does the tide near the coast. Nat decides to go out to get supplies from the neighbors. As he goes out, they notice piles of dead birds around the house and some others simply staying still on trees and roofs as they stare at him going to the neighbors' house. He finds the Triggs dead, and thus decides to take all their supplies. He gets back to his house, and in a few hours, the birds resume their attack. He lights a fire. The story ends as Nat smokes his last cigarette, and burns the pack in the fire, while the birds continue their siege on the house.
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