The Birds

More about The Birds

1963, Sacramento. The Alhambra Theater—cool air, velvet seats, a hush like church before the lights went down. I was young enough that movies weren’t stories yet—they were a reality I entered. Then came The Birds.

No monsters, no explanation. Just birds behaving wrong, weird in the deep medieval sense—the wyrd kind, not strange but fated.

I remember the sound first. Not music—heavy. Wings like apprehension you can’t shake. Beaks tapping like someone knocking from the other side of your skull. The theater held it all in, like a vast jar. When the lights came up, nobody spoke right away. We walked out quieter than we went in, as if we’d been shown something we weren’t meant to name. Outside, we looked at birds differently.

It was filmed up the coast, around Bodega Bay. A real place. That made it worse.

Years pass. 1974. Northern California winter—the kind that isn’t dramatic, just cold, wet, and windy enough to get inside your bones and stay there. I went to a three-day art club bacchanalia up there, near where the film lived. Painters, sculptors, people burning through ideas like driftwood. Wine, arguments, laughter tipping into something else. It had that edge—where art stops being polite and starts getting honest.

The landscape felt familiar before I could place it: low sky, gray water, houses sitting like they knew something. Wind off the ocean with no apology. Then it clicked—this is where the birds had learned their lines. Shorebirds from a Peterson’s guide seemed to be everywhere, plus the ducks. No cameras, just crows.

Birds of every kind were present—not attacking, not dramatic. Just watching. On rooftops, fence posts, lining edges. A stillness that wasn’t empty but full. You could feel them measuring space, the way an audience measures a stage. Small birds moved along the beach edge in the dune grass.

At the bacchanalia, people talked about freedom, breaking forms, letting the unconscious spill out—art and hypnosis. Outside, the birds held their own composition. No chaos, no manifesto. Just arrangement—natural order, not fear, not terror, but something placed in space with respect, even a kind of cooperation between species.

One morning I walked alone, cold mist holding to the ground. A crow lifted from a post as I passed. Nothing theatrical—just a shift, black against gray. For a moment it felt like the film again, stripped of story. No threat. No explanation. Just awareness moving through air.

In the theater, the birds had invaded the human frame. Out there, it was the opposite. We were the intrusion—temporary, loud, convinced of our center.

The birds didn’t care.

Two winters, eleven years apart. One on a screen, one under a sky. Same lesson, different volume: there’s a layer of the world that doesn’t translate into narrative. It doesn’t need to. It just watches, gathers, and waits—perfectly composed.