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Alfred Hitchcock on how to properly build suspense: "Four people are sitting around a table talking about baseball or whatever you like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and will go off in five minutes. The whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you've given them that information. In five minutes time that bomb will go off. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital. Because they're saying to you, 'Don't be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball. There's a bomb under there.' You've got the audience working."Hitchcock revealed on "The Dick Cavett Show" that 3,200 birds were trained for "The Birds" (1963). He said the ravens were the cleverest, and the seagulls were the most vicious.The crow that sits on Hitchcock's shoulder in all of the promotional photos was not in the movie. It was purchased after the movie had wrapped. A studio staff member bought it when he spotted the tamed bird on the shoulder of a twelve-year-old boy walking down the street. The boy was offered around ten dollars, but was hesitant until he discovered why it was needed.Hitchcock would constantly make puns and double entendres on the set. The last straw came when Suzanne Pleshette asked him if she could add a line, and he replied "You mean, Sweet Adeline?" She reacted by tackling the director, dictating, "If you continue this, you are gonna pay the price." According to Suzanne in a 2006 interview with Stephen J. Abramson, "People were sh!tting" when they saw her run him down.Hitchcock makes his cameo at the start of the movie, walking two dogs out of the pet shop. The dogs were actually his white terriers named Geoffrey and Stanley.When audiences left the U.K. premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, they were greeted by the sound of screeching and flapping birds from loudspeakers hidden in the trees to scare them further."You know, I've often wondered what the Audubon Society's attitude might be to this picture." (IMDb)Happy Birthday, Alfred Hitchcock!