The voracious seagulls

Sitting on a bench, a woman suddenly starts screaming, flailing in anguish: "What's wrong with my head? Oh, please! What's wrong with me?" A bird has landed on her, a tiny sparrow whose claws have become lodged in the tangle of fur. Has it jumped out of the nest? The fledgling flaps its wings desperately. I overcome my feathery revulsion and place the little sparrow in a tree pit. A woman who has joined the group crunches a piece of bread and crumbles it. "At least give him strength," she says. Will he survive in the urban jungle? I leave thinking not so much about being crushed by a car, but about the seagulls.

The next morning, boom, Mané Espinosa's wonderful photographs of the Plaza de la Gardunya appear, capturing how one of these sinister birds swoops down on a tourist's plate of paella to steal a prawn. The yellow-legged gull takes the trophy in its beak. What a scare! It's impossible to dissociate the encounter from Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds (1963). I think of the scene where Tippi Hedren locks herself in a telephone booth for shelter.

Daphne du Maurier, author of the eponymous story (1952), disdained for decades as a mere writer of romantic novels, loathed her fellow Briton's version. Despite having executed a masterpiece, Hitchcock watered down the story somewhat; he moved the action to Bodega Bay, an urban setting in sunny California, and focused the birds' aggressiveness primarily on one woman, the blonde actress, giving the story an Oedipal, psychological slant. Hedren, Antonio Banderas's ex-mother-in-law, had a terrible time; it's said that one day she left the set in a state of shock, shouting "You fat pig!" at the king of suspense. Who knows. What seems almost certain is that Hitchcock would have received a cancellation slap today.

In Hitchcock and Du Maurier's 'The Birds', birds conspire against the human species.

Du Maurier's novel takes place in a rural setting, in stormy Cornwall, on the west coast of Britain, still reeling from the austerity of the post-World War II era. While there's no explanation as to why seagulls, crows, rooks, gannets, and other birds are conspiring to launch a murderous attack on humans, there are signs here and there that speak to Cold War paranoia ("the Russians have poisoned the birds"), as Mark Fisher pointed out in his essay "The Weird and the Creepy ." The birds have left their differences behind, says Fisher, "to develop a kind of species consciousness, analogous to class consciousness." The welfare state is reeling.

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I doubt the seagulls that steal food from tourists are preparing a revolution, but their aggressiveness might explain something. They have become scavengers of the present; they voraciously consume our garbage, our great predatory feast. In any case, this is a perfect opportunity to vindicate Du Maurier, whose novel Parasites , inspired by his family, has just been published by Alba Publishing.