The film is loosely based on Daphne du Maurier's 1952 novella of the same name, though Hitchcock had screenwriter Evan Hunter develop entirely new characters and a more elaborate plot while keeping only du Maurier's title and concept of unexplained bird attacks. The novella's original setting was a Cornwall farm and its ending was far more pessimistic than the film's.

The story was partly inspired by a real mass bird attack on Capitola, California, on August 18, 1961, when seabirds dive-bombed homes and cars; Hitchcock used newspaper accounts of this event as research, and the film references a similar incident 'last year' in Santa Cruz. The real cause was later found to be toxic algae, though this was unknown at the time.

Screenwriter Evan Hunter began working on the script in September 1961, and he documented his correspondence with Hitchcock during the writing process in his 1997 autobiography Me and Hitch. Hunter originally wanted the protagonist to be a school teacher, an idea that ended up becoming the basis for the character Annie Hayworth instead.

Hitchcock cut the last ten pages (possibly more) of the screenplay to create a more ambiguous ending, and he originally wanted the film to end without a 'The End' card, but was forced to include one before wide release.

While most birds in the film were real, an estimated $200,000 was spent creating mechanical birds, and gulls were caught at the San Francisco garbage dump while sparrows were caught by John 'Bud' Cardos, though real captured sparrows had to be mixed with pet-shop birds to fill out the house invasion scene.

The special effects, supervised across multiple studios, used the sodium vapor ('yellow screen') process developed by Disney animator Ub Iwerks to avoid the 'fringing' problem caused by birds' rapid wing flapping; the film ultimately contained 370 effects shots, with the final shot being a composite of 32 separate elements.

Hitchcock avoided a conventional musical score, instead commissioning Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann to create an electronic soundtrack using the Trautonium (a synthesizer predecessor) for the bird calls, with Bernard Herrmann credited only as 'sound consultant'.

During filming of the phone booth attack scene, Tippi Hedren was injured and suffered facial cuts from shattering glass; she later said she had been misled about the sequence's logistics because mechanical birds were replaced with real ones at the last minute.

The film's first U.S. television broadcast on NBC on January 6, 1968 became the most-watched film on television up to that time, surpassing The Bridge on the River Kwai with a Nielsen rating of 38.9 and a 59% audience share, a record not beaten until Love Story in 1972.

The Birds is the only Hitchcock film ever spoofed in Mad magazine, in the October 1963 parody 'For the Birds,' which jokingly revealed the birds were controlled by Burt Lancaster in revenge for losing an Oscar for Birdman of Alcatraz.