The short story by Daphne Du Maurier and the movie produced by Alfred Hitchcock that bear the title "The Birds" are completely opposite of each other. The plot, setting, and characters of the book and movie differ greatly. Thus, you can see that even though there are some similarities there are very few.
In the short story the main character is Nat Hawkins, a disabled veteran who works part time on a farm in England. He likes to work alone while observing nature; therefore he knows an ample amount about birds and their behavior. For this reason, he quickly notices the irregularities in the way the birds act. When the birds begin to attack he is very calm and collected, as is his wife. The family that Nat works for, the Triggs, ignore the attacks and think they are all fun and games. Since they don't take them seriously, they and all the others get killed when the birds attacked.
In the movie, a lawyer named Mitch Brenner and a prankster named Melanie Daniels are who the story is centered around. Both live in San Francisco, but every weekend Mitch travels to Bodega Bay, where his mother and sister live. Ms. Daniels, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper editor, travels to Bodega Bay to deliver two lovebirds to Cathy, Mitch's sister. Wanting an excuse to stay, Melanie poses as a good friend of the schoolteacher, Annie Hayworth, who she had just briefly met earlier that day. With the exception of his mother, Mitch and his family stayed calm during the attacks. Lydia, his mother, panicked because she had to deal with the problem of the birds without her husband, who had only been deceased for a short period of time.
In the book and the movie the birds both attacked in patterns. They attacked for a short period, stopped, rested, then attacked again. Other than this, the movie has no other explanation of their behavior. In the book Nat figures out that the birds attacked with the tide.