When Alfred Hitchcock released his 1963 film "The Birds" it played upon what, for some, was a very real and severely limiting phobia. Quite simply, birds are everywhere. Whatever the cause of a person's fear of birds may be, the effect upon their life can be devastating.

Like any other phobia, no-one is born with a fear of birds. It generally has to be acquired through trauma or learned from someone with a similar problem. Like all phobias, it is a form of protection from something perceived as dangerous, no matter how unlikely or bizarre it may seem to anyone else.