Some of the birds were still alive but appeared to be in a daze, flopping around with a helpless, drunken sway instead of flying off. Most, however, were motionless, and he soon realized they were already dead. 

“It looked like there were a million of them. They were like locusts,” said Urbancic, who is now 82 years old and lives in Boulder Creek. “All over downtown and in the backyards. You just felt bad trying to avoid them going down the hill. They were so thick on the road you couldn’t help but hit some of them.”

When Urbancic crossed Soquel Creek and arrived at Benias, a coffee shop about a quarter of a mile away, he was surprised to find the birds were there too — and their behavior seemed to be even more erratic. The owner of the shop was baffled at how relentless they were. They had been trying to get inside the diner for hours, and he had been shooing them out all morning. Later, when Urbancic arrived at the docks to open the gates of the wharf as the sun was just beginning to rise, one of the birds dive-bombed him out of nowhere and started pecking at his leg. 

The bizarre string of unexplained avian events in the little coastal town that day would panic residents, stump scientists, and go on to inspire one of the most iconic horror movies of the decade — Alfred Hitchock’s “The Birds,” which just celebrated its 60-year anniversary this year. Urbancic doesn’t remember feeling frightened but concerned as he tried to coax this confused animal back into the water. 

“I’d never seen anything like it before,” he said. “We knew something strange was going on.” 

Word traveled quickly throughout the quaint, beachside communities throughout Santa Cruz County, and the news was published on the front page of the Santa Cruz Sentinel the following day, Aug. 18. 

“Seabird invasion hits coastal homes” the alarming headline read.

The birds, later identified as sooty shearwaters, weren’t just trying to barge into restaurants and peck passersby. They were startling residents awake in the middle of the night as their flailing bodies thudded like hail against rooftops and parked cars all the way from Pleasure Point to Rio Del Mar, reports said. Bleary-eyed families staggered out to their front yards with flashlights in hand, only to rush back inside as the birds ambushed them.  

The migration began at about 3 a.m., and police switchboards were almost instantly jammed as dispatchers at the Santa Cruz Police Department and sheriff’s office said they were getting more calls than they could handle. 

By daybreak, power lines and TV antennas were severed and the air reeked of an overpowering fishy stench from regurgitated anchovies strewn across the suburban lawns. Cats were seen running around the area, and children tried to gather some of the birds in boxes and take them back to the ocean, one report said. All told, Capitola police counted 4,000 birds that were dead or injured, and 2,000 others that were alive but wobbling around and wailing as if they were in pain. By 7 a.m., police reported many of the birds had flown out to sea, but days would pass before the rest were gone. In the aftermath of the strange incident, Urbancic remembered watching sanitation crews haul the birds out in garbage trucks, and the Red Cross even came to town to administer tetanus shots to people who had been bitten or pecked. 

‘Merely a coincidence’

The mysterious spectacle captured the attention of the late director Hitchcock, who phoned the Sentinel from Hollywood a few days after it occurred. He requested a copy of the newspaper be mailed to him so he could use the cover story for research as he prepared for his latest motion picture: a film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel “The Birds,” which would be filmed about 140 miles north in Bodega and Bodega Bay and released in 1963. Hitchcock, who owned a 200-acre estate in Scotts Valley, said it was “merely a coincidence” that the avian attacks occurred in Capitola while he was working on the film. But in another moment of strange synchronicity, a similarly gruesome phenomenon was playing out around the same time in the exact locations where he was shooting: In Bodega and Bodega Bay, ranchers were trying to figure out what to do with the onslaught of ravens that were plucking the eyes out of their sheep and eating them, perhaps inspiring one of the most terrifying scenes in the film.   

The so-called seabird invasion on the Central Coast left wildlife officials and residents scratching their heads. Ward Russell, a UC Berkeley museum zoologist interviewed by the Sentinel, speculated the birds had become confused by the dense fog and lost their way, seeking out streetlights to get back on course — a theory that made an appearance in Hitchock’s film. Others thought the birds had become alarmed by the heavy artillery firing at the Army’s Fort Ord on Monterey Bay, or had been sickened by the fish they were eating. A Santa Cruz County health officer suspected fungus-infected sardines may have been the culprit, and five birds that were still alive were sent to a Berkeley laboratory of the State Department of Health for further analysis. 

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife launched a separate probe, believing at the time that whatever was killing the birds was not transmissible to humans. But an explanation for the mysterious die-off event eluded scientists for decades. 

Something in the water

Sooty shearwaters — seafaring birds with dusty brown plumage and hook-tipped bills that are closely related to albatrosses — have one of the largest mass migration patterns of any bird species, traveling 40,000 miles from their nesting sites in the southern hemisphere to their feeding grounds in the north Pacific Ocean every year. On just about any given summer, around July and August, enormous colonies of hundreds of thousands of birds descend upon California’s coastline to take advantage of the overabundance of squid, anchovies and other small schooling fish, said Andrew Farnsworth, a senior research associate for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who studies bird migration.

But in 1961, the scavenging birds found more than just another meal.

Biologists finally started to solve the mystery of that strange day in Capitola 26 years later when, in the winter of 1987, three people died and at least 100 others contracted food poisoning from eating blue mussels on Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada. Scientists realized the toxin was connected to a diatom in the water known as pseudo-nitzschia, and identified the syndrome for the first time, describing it as amnesic shellfish poisoning, said Clarissa Anderson, the executive director of the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System and an expert on harmful algal blooms.

When more than a hundred brown pelicans and cormorants died four years later in Monterey Bay, scientists were still puzzled, but as they began to conduct necropsies of the birds, they realized their stomach contents and the anchovies they had been eating were filled with domoic acid — the same pseudo-nitzschia cells they had seen in Canada. 

Initially, they thought it was the first time a die-off event of this nature had ever occurred in the state of California. But researchers at UC Santa Cruz, Louisiana State University and Northern Arizona University came together with another hypothesis: What if this toxin was the same one that had killed the sooty shearwaters all the way back in 1961?

That’s when a team of scientists from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography went back and looked at archived samples of zooplankton guts that had been gathered from the event using sediment traps half a century prior. Their suspicions were confirmed, and in 2012, they co-authored a study revealing that high quantities of pseudo-nitzschia were, in fact, producing a neurotoxin in the water that infected at least 79% of the plankton the birds were eating, resulting in their strange behavior.

“Scripps was important because they provided the archived samples, but Mary Silver [at UC Santa Cruz] was the one who had the nugget of an idea to pursue this,” said Anderson, who studied in Silver’s lab and was pursuing her doctorate at UC Santa Barbara at the same time the discovery was underway.

Anderson remembers becoming fascinated by the size and scale of algal blooms and how they develop and impact wildlife, and wanted to delve deeper into these questions as a dissertation topic, but was initially discouraged.

“People said, ‘Don’t work on that, you’ll have one or two blooms in your PhD career, if that,’” she said. But around 2000, they became a near-annual event, and the level of toxins they produce has continued to increase every year.

‘You can’t fix the bloom’

It’s not out of the question to imagine that an incident like the one that served as inspiration for “The Birds,” could happen again — in fact, several have occurred, and not just among avian species. Fisheries along the West Coast were abruptly shut down in 2015 as a result of deadly levels of domoic acid found in Dungeness and rock crab. Three years later, a couple of brown pelicans seemingly “crashed” a graduation ceremony at Pepperdine University in Malibu as they swooped and zig-zagged over the crowd — around the same time dozens of other birds were found sick and dying along the Santa Barbara and Ventura coastline. Sea lion strandings occur on a near annual basis, and one of the most toxic events to date was reported last year. 

What has changed is how scientists respond to these mass stranding events. If hundreds of frenzied birds descended upon a California town tomorrow and started crashing into lights and pecking people, the first thing experts would do is conduct a series of rigorous tests to determine whether or not they could treat the animals, said Rebecca Duerr, who is the clinical veterinarian and research director at International Bird Rescue’s two wildlife clinics in Fairfield and San Pedro.

“We and the biology community do our best to determine the causes, and sometimes you never know,” said Duerr. “These days, we’re all afraid it’s going to be avian influenza, and the symptoms are pretty indistinguishable. But we have the tools to try to find those answers.” 

Anderson spent 15 years developing a forecast model for domoic acid levels in the ocean — not unlike a Doppler radar used to determine the weather forecast — that tells researchers when the organism producing harmful algal blooms is rising or falling. It’s currently in use by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and toxins are measured on a weekly basis at sites across California. If levels reach a certain threshold, that information is disseminated to state health departments, marine mammal rescue groups and avian experts at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“You can’t fix the bloom or turn it off, but you can start to allocate resources differently, prepare yourself, collect samples and deploy volunteers,” said Anderson. “Those are things that happen now but never happened before.” 

These groundbreaking discoveries are more important than ever as greenhouse gas emissions increase the acidity of the ocean, which can lead to widespread destruction of marine environments and other consequences for wildlife that go beyond Hollywood scenarios. 

“Any time I talk about pseudo-nitzschia to the public, I always talk about this connection to ‘The Birds,’” Anderson said. “Not only was it one of my favorite movies growing up, but it’s something people can latch onto as we look at whether there’s been a change in the frequency of these toxic events. We can prove the connection.”