The Birds

“Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone: yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.”

The sentences’ diction and rhythm imitate, in the form of language, the restless birds’ directionless flight. The narrator’s diction soars and stops, soars and stops, creating a rhythm that builds quickly to a crescendo, repeatedly.

“‘Did you hear that?’ he said. ‘They went for me. Tried to peck my eyes.’”

For the first time, Nat experiences a popular attack strategy of the birds: Get the human’s eyes to make him more vulnerable to further violence. The birds are treating the eyes as they do the windows, as their first targets.

“There were robins, finches, sparrows, blue tits, larks, and bramblings, birds that by nature’s law kept to their own flock and their own territory, and now, joining one another in their urge for battle, had destroyed themselves against the bedroom walls, or in the strife had been destroyed by him. Some had lost feathers in the fight, others had blood, his blood, upon their beaks.”

By listing the species of bird that joined in the battle in the children’s room, du Maurier makes the horror of Nat’s discovery more realistic. They are familiar birds, yet their dead bodies on the floor—evidence of the birds’ unnatural violence—indicate that Nat’s life will not be normal again.

“Jim was no more interested than Mrs. Trigg had been. It was, Nat thought, like air-raids in the war. No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.”

Nat uses an analogy to contextualize his neighbors’ indifference. They don’t care about the birds for the same reason they can’t understand his wartime trauma: a lack of shared experiences.

“The ground was too hard to dig. It was frozen solid, yet no snow had fallen, nothing had happened in the past hours but the coming of the east wind. It was unnatural, queer. The weather prophets must be right. The change was something connected with the Arctic circle.”

The unnatural power of the east wind gains brief recognition from Nat, but he is holding on to normality, so he uses the explanation Mrs. Trigg told him. The internal struggle of a character who ignores his intuition out of discomfort is a trait of Gothic horror.

“What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands…They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. […] They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line.”

Nat experiences the horror of discovering that a familiar sight is not what it seems. The uncanny side of nature, a theme of the story, is fully visible to Nat as he sees the gulls clearly for the first time.

“It reminded him of the old days, at the beginning of the war. He was not married then, and he had made all the blackout boards for his mother’s house in Plymouth. Made the shelter too. Not that it had been of any use, when the moment came.”

The passage contains information about Nat’s past, but the information is incomplete because the sentences are Nat’s thoughts, not the narrator’s interpretation of his thoughts. Readers must make inferences about what is left unsaid; such ambiguity is a central device in the story, and in this case, it creates an ominous tone. The unspoken memory seems to be something traumatic.

“The announcer’s voice was smooth and suave. Nat had the impression that this man, in particular, treated the whole business as he would an elaborate joke. There would be others like him, hundreds of them, who did not know what it was to struggle in darkness with a flock of birds.”

Nat is alone in his memory of battling the birds, but he has a better understanding of the seriousness of the country’s situation because of it. He knows that, without a similar memory to prepare them for the coming war, the announcer and all of the others won’t take the threat seriously.

“He could see the tide had turned. The rock that had shown in mid-morning was now covered, but it was not the sea that held his eye. The gulls had risen. They were circling, hundreds of them, thousands of them, lifting their wings against the wind. It was the gulls that made the darkening of the sky. And they were silent. They made not a sound. They just went on soaring and circling, rising, falling, trying their strength against the wind.”

The description of the seagulls rising silently, their massive numbers bringing unnatural darkness to the setting, illustrates The Uncanny Natural World disrupting normal life. It is an exemplary Gothic horror image.

“He watched them travel across the sky, and as one section passed overhead, within two or three hundred feet of him, he knew from their speed, they were bound inland, up country, they had no business with the people here on the peninsula. They were rooks, crows, jackdaws, magpies, jays, all birds that usually preyed upon the smaller species; but this afternoon they were bound on some other mission.

‘They’ve been given the towns,’ thought Nat, ‘they know what they have to do. We don’t matter so much here. The gulls will serve for us. The others go to the towns.’”

The birds’ war on humans is starting in earnest, and Nat begins to understand what they intend, almost as if he can read their thoughts. The birds have acquired human characteristics, in Nat’s mind.

“‘She’s another,’ thought Nat, ‘she doesn’t care. Maybe she’s had to answer calls all day. She hopes to go to the pictures tonight. She’ll squeeze some fellow’s hand, and point up at the sky, and say “Look at them birds!” She doesn’t care.’”

Nat is frustrated by the exchange operator, whose attitude is weary and impatient. He imagines her like he imagines everyone outside his family unit—uncaring and unprepared. With every character who disbelieves Nat or is dismissive toward his concerns, his isolation deepens; isolation is a reigning theme in Gothic horror.

“He did not want to tell her that the sound they had heard was the crashing of aircraft. It was, he had no doubt, a venture on the part of the authorities to send out reconnaissance forces, but they might have known the venture was suicidal. What could aircraft do against birds that flung themselves to death against propeller and fuselage, but hurtle to the ground themselves? This was being tried now, he supposed, over the whole country. And at a cost. Someone high up had lost his head.”

Nat appears to have specific knowledge of airplanes and an established disdain for the authorities, characteristics likely rooted in his wartime experiences. He is also certain that the birds have felled an entire aircraft, which speaks to his conviction in the birds’ ferocity. Notably, all of the birds’ most gruesome action occurs “off stage”; Nat witnesses neither the plane crash nor the Triggs’ death, yet these events achieve a fearful emphasis in their quality of being unseen.

“Then he remembered. They were gorged with food. They had eaten their fill during the night. That was why they did not move this morning…

No smoke came from the chimneys of the council houses. He thought of the children who had run across the fields the night before.

‘I should have known,’ he thought, ‘I ought to have taken them home with me.’”

The narrative’s point of view creates an ambiguity that demands readers make their own connections, likely resulting in a jolt of horror with the realization the children may have been eaten. The thought obliquely recalls the scene at the bus stop, where Nat warned the children to hurry home and they initially resisted.