Hitchcock's birds have visited

This past holiday one day in the late evening Elliot (our dog) began whining despite the fact that I had just taken him outside.  The whining suddenly increased in velocity and he became quite agitated, running from the back door to the front door barking furiously.  As usual, I was the only one who noticed the odd behavior, and the only one who acted on it.  I went to the back door and let him out.  Our door leads to the pool patio and another door leads to the outside.  Thinking perhaps he had an upset stomach or that an intruder was cutting our metal fence instead of hopping over it, I opened the door to the outside.  When I did the dog took off like a crazy animal.  He ran around the corner and tore down the length of our back yard to the side gate.  There he looked up into the sky and barked and barked.  I too looked above the sky and saw this:

Okay, I thought, birds.  We have a few different varieties of birds here in our Florida neighborhood that happens to be a bird sanctuary.  We get egrets, herons, wild parrots, seagulls, osprey, and the occasional pelican, as well as the usual birds such as doves, owls, blue jays, cardinals, sparrows, etc.  For the most part Elliot ignores birds.  He chases the egrets and the herons, and he barks at the wild parrots that perch on our electric pole out back, but the rest of them he ignores.  I thought it odd he was barking at these black birds in the sky, but he was suddenly crazed over them.

I ventured further out into the yard, joined now by my cousin Maya, and we watched as Elliot ran from one side of the house to the other, running as if he were after a rabbit and barking as if the intruder was already through the cut fence and now working on breaking through a window.  I wondered what in the world was up with him, and I went out into the middle of my yard, out into the open, and my jaw dropped.

The tree behind my neighbor's roof was completely covered in black birds.  (This picture was after most had flown off so it doesn't do it justice, but gives you an idea)  We could hardly see the branches of the tree as birds were perched on every limb.  They were also perched above on the telephone wires above my neighbors' and my house.  They were making some racket.  Maya thought they sounded like ducks.  I thought they sounded like a herd of geese.  We stood in awe at the sight and wondered aloud what the heck was happening.  While we stood Elliot took off running to the other side of the house again, looking up into the sky and barking.

Across the back of my other neighbor's house came more birds.  They flew and flew and flew, passing over our heads so close we could hear the flapping of wings, and they too settled in the tree.  There were so many of them that the sky was dark with birds, and we wondered aloud if we should be concerned.  Scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's movie, The Birds, began playing in my head, and I told Maya that that movie seemed so mild to me when I saw it, but that witnessing it in real life was just slightly terrifying.

Not long after saying that the birds flew off the tree.  The sound they made as they left in one giant flock was amazingly loud and ominous.  Maya and I stood and stared at one another.  Then suddenly the birds were back again.  They flew over our heads again and landed back into the tree.  By this point our screaming had brought out the rest of the house.  The kids took one look, thought it cool, but not exciting enough to tear them away from whatever game they were playing, and they went back inside.  Maya's husband, Jay, thought he would be sneaky and try to get close to the tree.  He opened the side gate, went outside it, turned around to close the gate so that he was facing us, his back to the tree, and then the flock left the tree in that same loud, ominous, haunting noisy way.  Jay's eyes about popped out of his head and he instinctively tucked his head between his shoulder blades.  The birds flew over our heads and house, flew toward the back, over the neighbor's house and disappeared.  The sky became clear and the squawking stopped and once again my backyard was silent.  It was as if nothing had ever happened.

But did it?