The Birds (film) Maurier's title and concept of unexplained bird attacks. In 2016, "The Birds" was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a young socialite, meets criminal defense attorney Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco pet shop. Mitch wants to purchase a pair of lovebirds for his sister's eleventh birthday, but the shop has none. He recognizes Melanie from a court appearance, but she does not know him; he plays a prank by pretending to mistake her for a saleswoman. Melanie
The Birds (film) as they carefully escort Melanie to the car past a mass of birds nearby. The car slowly makes its way through a landscape in which thousands of birds are ominously perching. Residents in the town of Capitola, California awoke on August 18, 1961 to find sooty shearwaters slamming into their rooftops and their streets covered with dead birds. News reports suggested domoic acid poisoning (amnesic shellfish poisoning) as the cause. According to the local "Santa Cruz Sentinel", Alfred Hitchcock requested news copy in 1961 to use as "research material for his latest thriller". At the end of the same month,