Going for a snowy walk the othe rday I had a Hitchcock horror movie flashback… In the treetops above my head, there was very loud chattering going on. Looking up one tree I was rather surprised to see it full of magpies. Not sure if they were having choir practice or some sort of conference… ; ) In my experience, magpies don’t often appear in big flocks like that – a whole tree full. Then I looked at the birds in a couple of other trees nearby. The sounds coming from there were a bit different. Crows, or jackdaws... Anyway, both groups of birds seemed to be doing their best to be as noisy as possible – and I got a definite feeling of hostility in the air!
Refreshing my memory on the Hitchcock movie in Wikipedia just now, I find a recent paragraph added at the end of that article, informing me that the BBC is making a television series out of 'The Birds', to be broadcasted in 2018 - set in Cornwall, and based more on the original Daphne du Maurier novelette than Hitchcock’s movie. Perhaps these birds were auditioning for it…They certainly did put up quite a show!
