WORLD NEWS | Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds foreshadowed environmental crisis 70 years ago

Hull, 11 April (conversation) In Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” (1952), changes in bird behavior are linked to the impact of technological developments after World War II.

As the 2022 State of the World’s Birds report warns, birds are “a barometer of the health of the planet”. Nearly half of the world’s bird species are now in decline. In du Maurier’s post-apocalyptic tale, set in Cornwall, birds launch a vicious, unprovoked attack on humans.

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Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of The Birds will celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2023. Revisiting the story of du Maurier’s relentless devastation shows how the author foresaw some of today’s most pressing environmental problems.

In her 1989 memoir Enchanted Cornwall, du Maurier claimed she was inspired by seeing a tractor working a Cornish field surrounded by a swirling “cloud of screaming seagulls”.

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This scene was transplanted into “The Birds” when its narrator, Nat Hocken, a disabled World War II veteran and land worker, observed some unusual behavior: “As the tractor moved up and down the hill along its path …the man in the tractor will be lost momentarily in the swirling clouds, crying birds.”

Nat admits that in autumn the birds always follow the plow: “but not in flocks like this, and not so loud”. The tractor — and the birds’ interactions with it — is significant because the vehicle is synonymous with mechanization and landscape change.

Historian JR McNeill explains in his book Something New Under the Sun that agricultural ecology changed starting in the 1950s, with large fields opened up and hedges removed in favor of industrial farming.

This creates a situation where animals’ “chances of survival and reproduction are apportioned primarily based on compatibility with human behaviour.”

In du Maurier’s story, the birds turned the tables with their attacks. “I can barely see what I’m doing,” the tractor driver, who asked not to be named, told Nat. As birds attack their eyes, vision becomes a metaphor for humans not being able to see natural changes.

By contrast, Nat eschews technology in favor of traditional methods (he trims hedges and works with a hoe) and quickly realizes the futility of the farmer’s attempts at bird shooting.

Like many environmental activists, Nat was ignored. His focus on the rhythms of birds and his traditional way of working were considered odd.

The aptly named Farmer Trigg was found dead in his gun as the birds mimic wartime aerial tactics to overcome modern warfare and farming techniques. This was underscored when an RAF fighter jet was later found shot down by birds in a field plowed by a tractor.

Du Maurier observes a world in which humans are increasingly detached from their environment.

This is reflected in her sensitivity to nature’s delicate balance and her concern for changing technology and society (Nat’s neighbor’s council building cannot withstand bird attack, while his old cottage has thick walls that provide more security sex).

The story persistently paints a picture of how the social and economic infrastructure we take for granted is fragile and ultimately unsustainable.

“The Birds” was published a decade before environmentalist Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962), a seminal book that highlighted the impact of pesticides on American agriculture Adverse biological effects.

Carson borrows from Romantic poet John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which takes place on a moor where “the sedge has withered from the lake, / No bird sings” , as one of its epigraphs, indicates that literature is expressing environmental crisis.

Carson’s scientific text opens with an apocalyptic vision:

Spring has no sound. On those mornings that had throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and many other birds, there was no sound now; only silence fell over the fields, woods, and marshes.

The birds are dying or dead, and their plight — both actual and symbolic — is indicative of broader environmental damage. Likewise, in “The Birds,” winter appears overnight and the ground hardens immediately.

Carson pioneered the understanding of man’s biological destruction of nature through her scientific writings. Du Maurier illuminates the danger through the novel.

In The Birds, Du Maurier shows that war—especially on the scale she witnessed as a civilian—is both a destroyer and a mobilizer of mechanization and chemical technologies that have caused and will continue to cause havoc on this planet.

Birds is a pessimistic story. Nat’s attempt to warn London’s birds of the imminent danger fails because the woman on the telephone switchboard is “terse, weary” and “impatient”, allowing Nat to observe:

She doesn’t care…she wants to go to the pictures tonight. She’d hold someone’s hand and point to the sky and say, “Look at these birds!”

Read today, Nat’s comments feel like a sarcastic observation of Hollywood’s interpretation of du Maurier’s story, which belies her original account. Modern readers need to “look” at Du Maurier’s “The Birds” more carefully to see that “something in nature has turned against us”.

In du Maurier’s thriller, birds become violent messengers of death. She terrifies contemporary readers with visions of the future that are very close to the present. (dialogue)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)