Couple wake to find 500 birds perched on their home

If you were woken by birdsong this morning, spare a thought for this couple. That’s because their sleep wasn’t interrupted by a pair of sparrows or blackbirds chirping away – but by an enormous flock of house martins descending on their home, Daily Mail reports.

Clive Lisseman, 68, and his wife Jackie’s home in Malvern, Worcestershire was overrun by nearly 500 birds early on Tuesday morning in scenes eerily reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror film The Birds. The house martins are believed to have chosen the roof of the Lisseman’s four-storey home as a stop off as they prepared to emigrate to Africa. The birds normally head south in October and it is thought the recent cold spell could have disturbed their normal migration patterns. Jackie, a grandmother-of-three, said: ‘The sky was just black with birds. ‘This is obviously their meeting place. All you can see are tails along the whole gutter. It is absolutely amazing - I’ve lived here 30 years and never seen this before. You cannot believe it. We have seen some sights here, but we have never seen this. ‘I counted at least 100 on the garage roof and I estimated there must have been at least 500 in total. ‘We were the only house on the street covered with birds. ‘We think the mothers laid the chicks in our guttering which is very high and the other birds came to look after them. ‘It was an incredible sight.’ Happily, the Lisseman’s experience is unlike that depicted in Hitchcock’s film, in which a small town in California becomes the target of violent attacks by all the birds in the area. daily times monitor

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