Talia De Antonis has been swooped on

EVERY decent horror gets a sequel, and residents in Gospel Oak have been warned that they might be in store for a second instalment of The Birds after a new wave of crow attacks in the area.

Twelve months after the New Journal revealed how a stretch of Mansfield Road had become a danger for anybody with long hair, warning signs have gone up in Lismore Circus that there could be a new corvid threat.

Talia De Antonis, 19, said she felt one of the birds dive-bomb her when she was walking her dog on Monday.

“I was thinking, ‘wait, what’s going on?’ I looked and I saw a crow. It started cawing at me but I kept walking my dog,” she told the New Journal.

“Then I felt it literally touch my head. It was quite forceful. I was just worried because imagine if it poked my eyes out or took my hair? So I kept walking and it happened again. I had to run.”

She added: “I was sending a voice note to my friends saying ‘guys do you remember the report about a crow a year ago?’ Then it touched my head again and I was literally screaming in the voice note and my friend was laughing at me. It was so random. They’re really speedy too.

“This year, I don’t think anything is stopping them. It was the day after I got back from Australia. I was like, ‘let me walk my dog, it’s been a while’. Then I got attacked by a crow and could only walk it for like five minutes.”

Warning signs in Lismore Circus

Warning posters have been placed on fences and bins, and the estate agency Day Morris, which has a branch in Fleet Road, told house hunters to be careful if going to the branch over the weekend. “Our dive­bombing crow is back for its annual visit, so make sure you’re on the lookout,” the firm tweeted.

Last June, we published film footage of a crow dive-bombing passers-by in nearby Mansfield Road. People said that on some occasions the scratches even drew blood. When we sent a reporter up to the street, she was swooped upon within a matter of minutes.

Journalist Anna Lamche getting attacked in Mansfield Road last summer

Shopkeepers in the road said they had noticed that it only happened to people with longer hair, while experts believe crows have the ability to memorise faces of humans they have deemed a potential threat, associated with previous negatives experiences and stressful situations.

Over a month-long period which saw people suffer cuts and bruises, residents took to carrying umbrellas and wearing hats to stop the swooping.

Alfred Hitchcock famously turned Daphne du Maurier’s novel The Birds into a terrifying film in which our feathered friends go rogue and start attacking humans. His 1963 film was said to be inspired on a real-life incident in which a mass of birds descended on the Californian seaside town of Capitola.

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