It is easy to miss the mechanical birds in the window, with flapping wings of scrap metal and wood and tail feathers of flattened spoons.
Later, Hitchcock allegedly "lied" to the actress, saying that he would use a flock of mechanical birds in a scene, but then used live birds that swarmed and pecked at her. "Not even the greatest trainer in the world could control every move an animal makes, especially when it's under stress," she writes in the book.
Cheap plastic toys are, however, the building blocks of "Chirps," a sound installation by Hong Kong-based Joao Vasco, in which dozens of mechanical birds tweet in a complex chain reaction.
Tim Lewis's mechanical bird might seem simple, but in terms of intelligence it has more in common with us than with nearly all other machines that humans have built.
Hannibal atop his elephant never envisioned one of his Carthaginian soldiers hand-launching a mechanical bird to check for a break in the weather as the troops crossed the Alps.
In the famous scene where she is attacked by the birds in a phone box she had been told that the box had shatterproof glass; in fact when the mechanical bird hit it and the glass shattered, she spent all afternoon having fragments of glass pulled out of her face.
As soon as I hit the water, my only reaction was to emit a scream that resembled a mechanical bird being shot over the skies of Tokyo in a horror film.
Henry's narrative alternates with that of Catherine Gehrig, a horologist at the Swinburne museum in London, who has been charged with reassembling the mechanical bird a century later.
In Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, a perfect mechanical bird cannot cure a sick Chinese emperor but a nightingale's natural song does.
