The aptly named Farmer Trigg is found dead with his gun, as the birds mimic wartime aerial strategies to overcome modern technologies of war and agriculture. His attentiveness to the birds’ rhythms and his traditional modes of working are perceived as strange. Like many environmental campaigners, Nat is ignored. Nat, by contrast, eschews technology in favour of traditional methods (he fixes hedgerows and works with a hoe) and quickly realises that the farm owner’s attempt to shoot the birds is futile. The Chichester Partnership / University of Exeter The unnamed tractor driver tells Nat: “I could scarcely see what I was doing.” As the birds attack the eyes, sight becomes a metaphor for humans failing to see the changes in nature.Ī young Daphne du Maurier. In du Maurier’s story, the birds turn this on its head – quite literally – through their attacks.

This created a situation in which animal “chances for survival and reproduction were apportioned largely according to compatibility with human action”. McNeill explains that agricultural ecology changed from the 1950s, with the creation of large fields and elimination of hedgerows in order to facilitate industrial farming. In his book Something New Under the Sun, historian J.R. The tractor – and the birds’ engagement with it – is significant, as the vehicle is synonymous with mechanisation and changes in the landscape.

Nat acknowledges that birds always followed the plough in autumn: “but not in great flocks like these, nor with such clamour”. This scene is transplanted into The Birds when its narrator, disabled second world war veteran and land worker Nat Hocken, observes some unusual behaviour: “As the tractor traced its path up and down the hills … the man upon it would be lost momentarily in the great cloud of wheeling, crying birds.” ScreenProd / Photononstop / Alamy Stock Photo Rod Taylor in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 adaptation.

The du mauriers