In the morning he clears up fifty dead robins, finches and other small birds. Using a blanket as a weapon, he kills as many birds as he can. Hearing his children screaming, he rushes into their room to find that they are being set upon by many more. Nat hears a bird insistently tapping on his bedroom window, and when he opens it half a dozen birds fly at his face and try to peck his eyes. That night the weather turns bitterly cold. One day in early December, he notices unusually large flocks of birds behaving restlessly, and he muses that they have received a message that winter is coming. Nat Hocken, a disabled war veteran, works part time for Mr Trigg at his farm on the Cornish coast. In 2009, the Irish playwright Conor McPherson adapted the story for the stage at Dublin's Gate Theatre. The story was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, released in 1963, the same year that The Apple Tree was reprinted as The Birds and Other Stories. By the end of the story, it becomes clear that all of Britain is under aerial assault. A farmhand, his family and community come under lethal attack from flocks of birds. The story is set in du Maurier's home county of Cornwall shortly after the end of the Second World War. " The Birds" is a horror story by the British writer Daphne du Maurier, first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree. For the 1957 Norwegian novel by Tarjei Vesaas, see The Birds (novel).
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