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Without Tasmania, Where Would Alfred Hitchcock Be?
In 1964, the sensational movie The Birds established a new genre of movie making. The thriller movie, based on nature gone wrong, was brought to a state of fine art by Alfred Hitchcock and imitated widely for the next two decades. Little do most people know that the basis for his idea evolved in the little town of Capitola, California, when thousands of shearwaters, migrating to their nesting sites in Tasmania, blew off course and inundated the town, scaring the residents out of their wits. Though the event occured there, the film was actually shot in Bodega Bay, further up the coast.
So how does this photo of a rugged hunter fit into the story? He’s a muttonbirder, an Aboriginal Tasmanian who collects some of the nesting shearwaters out of their burrows, once they’ve arrived in the southern hemisphere.
The venerable National Geographic had it wrong when it attempted to explain the crisis in Capitola. Instead, a Tasmanian scientist who monitors the muttonbird collecting has a better explanation of what went wrong on that August night—a simple explanation that clears up the 37 year old mystery.
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