''The birds was also inspired by a real-life bird attack. On August 18, 1961 the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper blared with the headline''Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes.'' It claimed that ''millions'' of birds smashed into cars and buildings in the tiny town of Capitola and even attempted to enter houses. It says that when flashlight-wielding citizens went outside in the middle of the night to see what was going on, hostile birds drove them right back into their houses. After some research, it was revealed that the attacking birds were sooty shearwaters who had feasted on nearby anchovies and were likely driven insane by nerve-damaging toxins in the contaminated food.''

Capitola residents and visitors reported that they heard smashing and crashing - thuds on their roofs. Awoken by the cacophony, some stepped out of their homes, armed with flashlights, only to find that the birds flew straight toward them.

''One woman in Opal Cliffs opened the door and about six birds wanted to come in her house,'' says Frank Perry, curator of the Capitola Historical Museum.

The owner of the Venetian Court Motel at the time, Edna Messini, who was bitten by a sooty sheerwater during the frenzy, said she heard the sea birds crying like babies, and that, ''They slammed against buildings, regurgitated fish, and knocked themselves out.''

In the morning, yards and streets were blanketed with avian corpses and half-digested anchovies. Birds that survived the night lacked the strength to take flight. They huddled under cars and in alleys, and hid from felines, attracted to the pungent aroma that permeated the air. Concerned citizens worked to gather the surviving birds and bring them back to the ocean where they were reported to regain their liveliness.

''Truckloads of dead birds were hauled away. Altogether, there were several thousand birds,'' says Perry. ''Public works and various sanitation departments sent guys out to collect the dead birds, many of which were run over in the streets. It was a mess.''

''In 2012, with this in mind, a team of scientists studied zooplankton from the Monterey Bay that The Scripps Institute for Oceanography had collected in the summer of 1961, and stored. They soon found the source of the sooty shearwaters' spastic actions, a neurotoxin called domoic acid, which had moved up the food chain from algae to anchovy to sooty shearwater.

Nothing quite like the sooty shearwater invasion of 1961 has struck Capitola since, and although the movie wasnt based solely on the incident, it is still quite strange that the films production occurred at the same moment in history.''

Strange.. very strange indeed.

Bump