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La Grange, Kentucky is a real life 'The Birds' town

9:45 PM, Jan 25, 2012   |    comments
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By Jeanne Moos

(CNN) - It's like a Hitchcock movie with one hitch: it's real.

For the past three months, a Kentucky neighborhood has gradually been invaded by a cloud of birds.

In La Grange, Kentucky, folks don't just watch "The Birds," they're living it.

They're being held hostage in maybe a three mile radius by black birds. Black birds that fly in like clockwork every evening at dusk to roost in a wooded area, then fly out in the morning.

Hair stylist Antoinette Taylor decided to shoot the birds.

"It was exciting 'cause we'd never seen anything like it, but now it's ridiculous because kids are catching eye infections from the bird droppings," said Taylor.

In that one little area of La Grange they're using umbrellas, but not just for rain. The birds are leaving these folks pooped.

"We wash our cars every single day," said Taylor.

In Hitchcock's "The Birds," the townspeople worried about being pecked to death. But here, they're worried about being pooped to death.

It's more like that scene parodying "The Birds" in "High Anxiety."

Between 5:30 and 6 p.m. residents like Taylor make a run for the shelter of their cars. Bird experts say this is not that unusual. When starlings do it, there's a name for it: murmuration.

Murmuration is a synchronized swirl of starlings. The word was popularized after two filmmakers one a canoe trip in Ireland shot the phenomenon and put it to music.

But in La Grange, they're holding their breath because of the smell from the droppings, and trying unsuccessfully to drive the birds away with noise cannons.

The forecast for the foreseeable future? A 100 percent chance of murmuration.

CNN

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