Headlines about bird flu weren’t anything new. But, this time around, it seemed different. More ominous. To Ramona, it felt all too familiar. Like the headlines that were cropping up at the end of 2019 and early 2020 before anyone knew that coronavirus was coming for them as much as it was for the Chinese. Now, here they all were at the end of another year, and the darkly-punctuated-by-news background of her various relatives’ homes were buzzing with reports of mass cow deaths, infections in farmworkers throughout the Central Valley and the skyrocketing price of eggs. It was the latter that people were most concerned about, what with the holidays imminent and so many wanting to offer up their precious baked goods to people who would smile politely as they took a bite out of it before waiting until backs were turned to spit it out in a napkin and ditch it as soon as possible. Waste was simply the name of the game in the Western world. And it didn’t get more Western than California. 

It was not only the very edge of the Western world, but also, from many people’s perspective, the very edge of sanity. Melanie Daniels found that out when she went there—to the farthest reaches of its coast (Bodega Bay)—to follow-up on a meet-cute with Mitch Brenner in The Birds. A movie filled with as much bird flu subtext as it is “devil woman” subtext. At least, that’s how Ramona felt watching it now, as she decided to do with all this bird phobia in the air (no pun intended). It was in her nature (like many other humans) to further amplify her sense of anxiety by reveling in it. By allowing herself to bask in all possible worst-case scenarios. And what could be worse than if the birds with bird flu started acting like the birds in, well, The Birds? Already, there were “echoes” of that vibe. Someone in Louisiana had contracted their sickness from a flock in their own backyard. 

In many regards, this was a crueler way to be “attacked” by birds than more physically outright, as Melanie and the townspeople of Bodega Bay were. Because it was much more insidious. That a tiny bird could fell entire large-scale holding pens filled with cattle didn’t bode well for humans. Humans that could get the H5N1 subtype from their exposure to any animal that had contracted this particular flu from a bird (or birds). Which is why, more than ever, those who went to zoos were fools and knaves. Ramona, unfortunately, happened to live nearby a small local zoo. Its most exotic creature was a lonely mountain lion that looked almost as miserable as hospital worker during Covid. Or just a hospital worker in general.

In any case, she couldn’t avoid passing by the zoo on her walk to the bus stop each morning. Where she had recently heard that the aviaries had been closed after an infected bird landed in the cage of a few monkeys and caused an older one to die. It was just one of many shitshows unfolding while the virus continued to spread. That said virus was now adapted to infecting cattle didn’t bode well for how quickly it was starting to “jump” among species. The latest example being the sick cattle, in turn, infecting humans that got in close enough proximity to them (usually for job-related reasons). 

But the CDC kept assuring that, as of yet, there has been no known transmission of bird flu from human to human. So let’s all “rest easy,” right? Ramona balked inwardly as she watched a flock of birds seize upon Melanie in a phone booth. And then, in an attic (it was said that, in a retaliative maneuver, Alfred Hitchcock made Hedren act with real birds instead of the mechanical ones he promised after she had rejected his gross sexual advances). The retroactive metaphor, at present, seemed that they could get to you anytime, anyplace. Whenever they arbitrarily felt like it. Lately, oh, how they arbitrarily felt like it. Unlike Melanie’s reaction inside the Brenners’ home, however, Ramona wasn’t exactly exhibiting signs of near sexual ecstasy over potential exposure to a species that had turned deadly. And yes, it had done so, in each fictional and real-life case, as a result of careless human behavior. As Mrs. Bundy, the town’s resident ornithologist puts it, “Birds are not aggressive creatures. They bring beauty into the world. It is mankind, rather, who insists upon making it difficult for life to exist upon this planet.” This said at a time when industrialization as spurred by capitalism hadn’t even yet scratched the surface of what it would be capable of. 

To Ramona, or anyone with common sense really, it was no coincidence that the year—1878—“fowl plague” was first identified by Italian parasitologist Edoardo Perroncito was at the start of the Second Industrial Revolution. And also, not long after the birth of California as we know it. For California was not really “itself” in the modern fashion until the Gold Rush attracted hundreds of thousands of people to it starting in 1849—smack-dab in the middle of the nineteenth century. Which makes California even more infantile than the U.S. as a construct both geographical and philosophical. Yet, in numerous manners, it appears to have more wisdom than the rest of the country. It’s so-called “brethren.” Because at least it had the good sense to learn, somewhat, from the mistakes made during the beginning of 2020’s infamous pandemic, declaring a state of emergency early on. Then again, the public appeared to forget that the outbreak had been plaguing farms since the beginning of 2024, and also that, as early as April, an eerie new precedent was set. And that was, per the CDC, that someone in the U.S. “tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 bird flu. This would be the first reported cow-to-human spread of H5N1 bird flu.” But Ramona could sense, deep within her bones that it would hardly be the last. Fowl plague is a foul plague. Fouler than most. With the obvious propensity to upend the world—or rather, the world as humans know it—even more markedly than coronavirus did. 

With this thought in mind, Ramona kept replaying the scene of Melanie being attacked by the birds in the attic. She didn’t know why, but it was soothing to her. More soothing, anyway, than the prospect of going outside and risking an “IRL” encounter with a bird. The “rats of the sky.” Maybe Hitchcock was right to warn humans that, with contemptuous thinking like that, it was only a matter of time before the birds turned on humans in a very dangerous way.