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Study 113 - The Birds - Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-11-21 17:11:01
Imported:
2024-11
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We're sticking a fork in The Birds by Daphne du Maurier, and it's delicious!

Special thanks to reader Marty Jopson!

Eagle flies off with goat! Watch those cliffsides...

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Comments

Robert Curtin

Chad, you mention that Cows and Birds having an alliance is obvious, but COWS WILL EAT BIRDS! My friends raise cows and they had someone hunting birds nearby, and some of the birds fell into the cow pens AND THE COWS. ATE. THEM. ALL. Cows, deer, and squirrels, (among others), are all opportunistic eaters, and will eat anything, even meat if it's available and they're desperate enough. Though my chickens gladly eat hamburger if you let them, so I suppose it's all equal in the end. (I love this story!)

HRPrice

Historically*, Bats tend to sit out wars between Birds and Beasts. So the bats probably won’t come for you but don’t expect much help, either. *Folklorically

Ethan Cordray

I think we'd win a war against the birds, so long as the cats stayed on our side.

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

Alas, I'll have to break with tradition and not listen to an episode shortly after it's posted. The wife and I are wrangling short-notice plans to visit Spain next week for a month, so I'll need a lot of listening material. Ergo, I'll save this episode (and the new DART adaptation) for the flight. I'm also downloading a slew of classic HPPodcraft and Strange Studies episodes while I'm at it. I've been listening to you gents for a long time, so old episodes are like old friends.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

When I was in grad school, my advisor, a kindly, no-nonsense German man named Wolfgang to whom weirder professors in trouble with the administration would come for career advice, was on friendly terms with a literature professor who had an alarming power over the beasts of the air. I once saw this lit. prof. summon with a harsh syllable a flock of birds from the ledges of the arts-and-sciences building; they flew around him, accompanying him on his brief walk inside the building, and then returned to their ledges as he entered. Noticing me from the threshold, he looked back and said, "Tell Wolfgang you saw me do this." (The lit. prof. was eventually fired for sexual harassment, but I think that was unrelated to the bird thing.) So, anyway, I'm figuring someone like him was behind it all. Or maybe crows, who are good at keeping and passing on grudges against individual humans.

Sanjay Mathew

I just wanted to make a post to appreciate the BBC announcer impression.

Jim Cannon

Oh, I don't know. I don't think the birds can sustain their losses indefinitely. If the ground is littered with dead birds, and they're just throwing themselves at buildings without regard for personal safety, I think there's a chance the family will survive. With the tide pattern, and the mass chaos, there will be abundant resources for Nat to recover if he keeps his head. Plus, if it is winter, most of the birds should be migrating soon, right? RIGHT? Anyway, you figure the tide thing has something to do with the Moon? Maybe there are solar flares or shifting solar winds bouncing off the reflective disk of the Moon's face and its influencing all the little dinosaur brains on the ground. All humanity has to do is destroy the Moon, and the emergency will be over.

Robby H.

Why wasn't the turkey allowed to sit at the kids table on Thanksgiving? Because it used fowl language!

KateSherrod

One of the first biological apocalypse novels I ever read, Charles Pellegrino's DUST, posits what would happen if all the insects were suddenly to die off, and it is grim. Not the slow agricultural/ecological decline we've come to expect, though; the mites, whose population depends on insects a whole lot, get very hungry and quickly adapt and become something very like the Vashta Nerada from Doctor Who (hey, who turned out the lights!). This discussion reminded me of that book, which also features vampire bats getting out of hand. Shudder. https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ef481846-6190-4d2b-b801-e839189b8c28

Clint Page

So when Lying Vincent Price showed up in this episode to talk about The Birdcage and said that it starred Diane Lane rather than Nathan Lane, was that part of the lie, or was that a Freudian slip on Chad's part due to what I assume is a lifelong crush on Diane Lane?

Jeremey Guttilla

A block away from my old house was a funeral home with a water tower right next to it, a gang of 10-30 turkey vultures hung out on top of that thing every day, always found that vaguely ominous.

Tara Murphy

I FINALLY downloaded the Patreon app so I don't have to login every time through my browser. I'm gonna start commenting more! This is exciting! My sister is obsessed with birdwatching. I don't know if she would enjoy this story or not. Do you think people's pet parrots joined in on the rampage?

Derek Scott

“Those kids got too jazzed!”

It's a Ghost.

I enjoyed your reference to 2 Live Crew in last week's episode but was disappointed you failed to mention the reference to Primus in this week's episode. "'Light up the Primus,' he said to his wife. 'Make us some tea, and the kids some cocoa. No use sitting around doing nothing.'" Also, after a little digging, I guess a Primus in the context of this story is a kerosene stove :(

It's a Ghost.

Having seen the movie I thought I knew how the story would end, but then when I realized there were only a few paragraphs left, I realized it probably wasn’t going to end well, and I love it for that. With the nature of the story, I don’t think we need a clear answer about how it all turns out, because that’s not the point.

Alan Ricks

The Humans should of dressed up as cows. Or in cows, tauntaun style.

Alan Ricks

Killing birds in mass got me thinking about Mao’s disastrous Four Pests campaign. He ordered every sparrow in China to be killed. The pursuit of this of course caused a massive ecological imbalance and led to the Great Famine which killed some 20-30 million people. But they killed million of birds. So if the humans succeeded against the birds in the story its probably some sort of mutually assured destruction with a total collapse of the ecology. Also machine guns were used to kill large quantities of birds before. The Emu War of Australia killed hundreds if not thousands of indigenous emus so settler-colonialists could use the emu’s lands for ranches and farms. Emus won.

Ben A

Yep, I agree, this is a bleak ending. Unlike so many other tales you two have covered featuring humans versus nature (Three Skeleton Key, Leiningen Versus the Ants, Thurnley Abbey....okay, not that last one unless we count ghosts as parts of nature), there is no heroic foreshadowing in The Birds. It feels thoroughly apocalyptic at the end. Even were the family able to survive and the bird attacks ended as abruptly as they appeared, society would be decimated both structurally and psychologically. No one would be able to travel outside without living in constant terror of every bird they saw. It's truly a vicious tale. I agree that it runs a close parallel to how individuals who live through a war have lasting traumas resulting from their nightmarish experiences. (I have a friend who lived in the Balkans during the war in the 1990s and they still cannot endure the sound of fireworks.) As a modern reading, this is very much a climate change parable. I can't help but liken it to the effects of so many storms across the globe recently, causing flooding, destroying infrastructure, and removing basic needs for survival. Forces occurring beyond our control suddenly upend lives, destroying communities and homes. And much like The Birds, I don't see a happy ending, lest a triumphant one, anywhere in the future. Du Maurier is truly a master writer, and I encourage you all to read Rebecca. If you want a shorter tale to cover that really fits the estrangement theme, check out The Blue Lenses. It's less subtle than Don't Look Now, but it's a good read.

Moonflight Dancer

Chris and Chad's commentary about Nat's wife's hysteria and Nat's own coping mechanisms makes me think about how even during absolute insane circumstances we expect level headness from our main characters just as we expect it from people. It doesn’t matter if Nat or his wife keep a stiff upper lip or completely crack. They and their children are at the mercy of powers beyond their ability to affect. Just like in War of the Worlds, the social expectation for behavior as well as the innate human hope, are ultimately revealed as just as flimsy as everything else. Nat might have bought his family a few more days by keeping his wits, but those days are only set to be punctuated by greater misery and panic.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I certainly appreciate that it *seems* like the birds must be coordinating - perhaps with some sort of central command - but I think it far more frightening if this is an example of emergent behavior that requires no such coordination. Murmurations or schooling look coordinated, but aren't. Social insects look like little communes of shared effort, divisions of labor, and self sacrifice for the greater good - all without any kind of central command. So I rather like the idea that the birds one day developed a new behavior without anything like rhyme, reason, or goal.

Aaron La Vene

I hope he realizes their greatest weakness… the coat hanger

grey tom

[heavy sigh] "Well - gulls will be gulls."

Beanz

This story made me think of the movie, "The Happening." The basic premise of unexplained mass suicides and visualizing that on the big screen was powerful for me. The basic premise of "birds turn on humanity" sounds kind of silly until reading Daphne's vision of it. I think that if Daphne or Clark Ashton Smith had written "The Happening" as a short story or novel, it would have been VERY effective. PS. CAS does actually have some plant stories. I had no idea until I started listening to "Strange Shadows." PSS. Yes, "The Happening" is a Shyamalan. Yes, it gets worse as it goes along. 🤷‍♀️