Birds. Naughty or nice? I am a great fan of Alfred Hitchcock, so when I first saw his 1963 film “The Birds,” with Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, I considered it one of his best. Everything about it technically was perfect, I thought, but I was troubled by its premise.
Jack Peradotto never thought he’d be afraid of a wren. The whole notion of a conspiracy of birds against humanity for some spooky, unspecified, mysterious transgression I found preposterous, kowtowing to prescientific magical thinking. These were not the birds I knew from childhood and I scoffed at Hitchcock’s treatment of my old friends.
I grew up in a small town on the central Illinois plains rich in birdlife. I was early fascinated by their beauty, their power of flight, their freedom, their unfailing devotion to parenting, their lush and variegated song. My interest in them never waned, but the urban settings that were my home after childhood saddened me a little by their curtailed encounter with the sounds and sights of birdlife.
And I never lost my disappointment over Hitchcock’s cinematic defamation of my beloved feathered friends. When I retired to Tucson, Ariz., I discovered that I was living in one of the top locales for density of bird species.
Now in bird heaven, I was determined to revive my childhood passion. Overwhelmed by the rich variety of birdsong around me, I downloaded an app to my iPhone called Xeno-Canto, which has gathered thousands of recorded bird calls from around the world. On.
