1983, but was postponed for six months to accommodate Modine's shooting schedule for Mrs. Soffel (1984). Principal photography began in Philadelphia on May 15, 1984, with a budget of $12 million. The script required that a total of 24 locations be used for filming in Philadelphia and Santa Clara, California. Animal trainer Gary Gero employed the use of 80 different canaries for various scenes in the film, as well as pigeons, a hornbill, a cat, eighteen dogs and a seagull. A women's prison wing located in the Philadelphia House of Correction doubled for a scene set in an Atlantic City jail. A scene depicting Birdy and Al climbing an elevated railway was filmed at the 46th Street Station above the intersection of Farragut and Market Street in the Mill Creek neighborhood. The cast and crew then moved to Philadelphia City Hall, where Wilson Goode, the city's first African American mayor, visited the set and gave the production his blessing. After four weeks of filming in Philadelphia, the cast and crew moved to Wildwood, New Jersey, which doubled for scenes set at the Atlantic City boardwalk. Filming then moved to San Francisco, California. The scene where Birdy and Al climb atop a refinery building was filmed on the rooftop of an abandoned gasworks in Hercules, California. The scene required Modine and Cage to hang off the edge of the roof secured by safety wires, while the sequence in which Birdy falls off the roof was performed by a stunt double. The production next filmed Birdy's flight on an ornithopter at the Newby Island landfill in Santa Clara County. The filming of the scene was considered to be a health concern among the cast and crew, due to the exposed garbage and smell of methane gas. The filmmakers originally planned to shoot Birdy landing in a reservoir thirty feet away from the landfill, but a test of the water had shown it to be hazardous. Parker said, "We experimented with a 100-foot wire hanging from a helicopter to allow us to 'fly' Birdy into a pond we'd constructed at the bottom of a hill of garbage." The military hospital scenes were filmed at the Agnews Developmental Center, a psychiatric and medical care facility located in Santa Clara. A corner of the hospital was used to film scenes set in Birdy's bedroom. The production then moved to Stockton, California to depict a scene