Themes and plot devices in Hitchcock films other iconic stairwell shot comes from the movie "Suspicion" as Cary Grant slowly walks up the stairs to deliver what would have been the poisonous warmed milk to his wife. Hitchcock, the studios and Grant decided his character could not end up as a murderer and that scene becomes a red herring with a new ending added. In "The Birds", the camera follows Tippi Hedren up the stairs to the attic where (suspensefully) the birds wait silently to attack her. Staircases also appear prominently in the 'ball-gown scene' in "Rebecca" and in the 'guard-dog scene' in "Strangers on a Train".
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,