Reading this thread made me wonder. Have any of you ever hit a bird with your car? I’ve come close, but bever quite hit one. How much damage did it do?
A bird glanced off my slowly (less than 30mph) moving car and kept going, though in a different direction. Hopefully it’s all right. My wife hit a bird of some sort (it had brown feathers) with her truck and an avian corpse had to be dug out of the grill.
When I first saw the header, I thought it said “bride.” :eek:
A bird once flew straight into the grill of my mother’s car. When she got home, the dead bird was stuck halfway inside and the grill was actually pretty well bent. It was a pretty horrific scene, but I admit I had to laugh when I came into the garage and saw my father trying to remove the carcass with a pair of barbecue tongs.
I once had a small bird wedged into the grill of the pickup that I was driving at the time. I was driving about 55-60 mph. It didn’t do any damage to the grill, but the bird hit with a mighty “THUD!” Needless to say, the poor little guy didn’t survive. I really didn’t know what else to do as I was going to be out and about for awhile and I didn’t want a bird stuck in my grill all afternoon. As soon as I got to the town I was headed to I pulled up to a dumpster behind some store and used it to dispose of the bird accordingly.
When I was much younger, I ran into a huuuuge low altitude owl while driving down the highway. It came thru my windshield and nearly killed me. It dented my hood('76 Trans Am) bloodied the interior of my car and put a huge tear in the leather of the passenger seat of my car. It cost me nearly $1,500 to fix.
(not to mention the steam cleaning bill for the drivers seat)
When I was quite young, twelve or so, I saw a sparrow fly in front of a truck and almost make it. He got squished under the front passenger tire. I couldn’t believe what I saw but sure enough when I looked there was flat sparrow on the road.
When I was in my late teens and driving someone to the airport a bird bounced off the car right behind the driver’s side door. I looked in the side view mirror after hearing the thud and saw the bird fall away to the side of the road. I’m quite sure it was dead
Once a duck took off over the road at a ninety degree angle, and its butt bumped the top of my car.
I hit a couple of birds (not at the same time) with my Subaru Justy. No other car I’ve owned has killed a bird (to my knowledge). Both killings were at low speed to at ~30mph.
dead0man
Galahs are a very common gregarious native bird that has done rather well out of human incursion. In particular during the grain harvests when flock of hundreds pick up the spilt grain along the side of the road.
Now the term galah is a colloquial, derogative term in Australia, because these birds are stupid at the best of times and suicidally so under these circumstances because:
- Whenever startled they fly off in one direction and then unfailing swoop back the other en masse.
- They gorge themselves on grain to the point where they are too heavy to gain sufficient altitude to avoid a car, let alone the prime mover of a semi-trailor.
- Being profoundly greedy sods, they return to the roadside within seconds of a vehicle passing.
Consequence … road kill carnage.
My worst incident is six near simultaneous strikes. Have lost one windscreen and numerous radio antennae, external mirrors, headlights etc.
I had these pigeons that were always milling around on the street where I live. Usually, all you’d have to do is slowly drive toward them and they’d flutter out of the way. No biggee.
Once, though, I was driving–slowly, natch–and the pigeons got out of the way as usual, but there was this one that I didn’t see move. I assumed he hopped away at the last minute, out of view near the tire. Nope. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw it just lying there. I felt pretty bad. 
I didn’t so much hit a bird as a bird hit my car. A bird once flew straight into my windshield. It wasn’t as if I was whipping down the highway and hit it as it was flying along; no, it dove into my path, and I was driving relatively slowly in a residential area.
It flew away, but it made a pretty good thump. I hope it survived.
A seagull flew into the windshield while I was driving once. At the time I was stationed at a computer installation in Newport, RI. We subcontracted with another base facility to run a daily job on a shipboard computer and the nearest shipboard computer was in New London, Conn. So we had to drive the 100 miles or so to New London, run the job (which took about 8 - 10 hours, depending on how the stupid computer was running that day) and drive back to RI. This would have sucked in a good car. However, we didn’t have a good car, we had a Navy-issue Gremlin. Anyway, one time I was zooming along the interstate (or as close to zooming as you can come in a Gremlin), almost to New London and this giant seagull flew into the windshield. I can’t speak for other cars, but if you hit a large bird with the windshield of a government-issue Gremlin the windshield breaks! Or shattered, more like. I was picking beads of shatter-proof safety glass out of my hair for the rest of the day.
Jess
I was driving a Ford Crown Victoria with full police package when I hit a turkey. It cracked the windshield and knocked the rearview mirror into my lap.
I had a pigeon dive into my left headlight once. It was night, and I was doing about 150 km/h. I saw a flash in front of me, a loud bang, and then I noticed my left headlight was out.
I pulled into a gas station, and opened the hood. The bird had crashed through the entire headlight unit, ending up in the engine compartment. Since various things move at high speed in there, the result was a nice pigeon stew sprayed all over the engine compartment.
The gas station owner was kind enough to lend me his high pressure cleaner. :eek:
I hit a gull once. It was just sitting there and I thought it would be smart enough to move… but it wasn’t. I felt awful about it for days afterwards, because I think I hurt it pretty bad, but not bad enough to kill it Damage to the car was negligible, there were some feathers stuck to the front bumper in something gooey, probably blood.
(Fella bilong missus flodnak said that, on the one hand, he loves the girl who’s sensitive and caring enough to cry over a gull. On the other hand, IT’S ONLY A BLEEPING SEA GULL!)
The flodfather had less luck. He hit a largish bird - a grouse, he thought, though he didn’t get a clear look - when on his motorcycle. The glass windshield on the fairing was destroyed. He stopped and looked for the bird, thinking maybe he could put it out of its misery, but he never did find it. Fortunately he wasn’t hurt.
I’ve been behind the wheel for the deaths of three birds: one buzzard and two roadrunners.
The buzzard was an oblique hit off of the front grill that sounded like the truck hit a bowling ball, but no damage was done.
Both roadrunners were hit while I was driving a large van; neither did any damage. The roadrunner deaths (both were suicide, I tell ya!) each bummed me out…
I was responsible in high school for the accidental extermination of a flock of geese. I was driving on the freeway, and had come to my exit- the off ramp was elevated, and there was a pond on either side of the ramp.
Anyway, as I was exiting, a flock of white geese decided that now was a good time to cross from pond A, to pond B. Right in front of my car. Without leaving me any time to react.
Apparently the neck height of your average North American goose is exactly the same height as the front end of a 1986 Pontiac Firebird.
The noise that the birds made as they were swiftly dispatched to meet their maker was one I will never forget. “BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA” It sounded like Muhammed Ali working an avian speed bag. As I was passing through the flock, all I could see in my rear view mirror was white feathers.
After I was able to slow down, I spent the next 20 or so minutes dragging 15 dead geese off to the side of the road, so that no one else had to see them.
Thankfully, there was no real damage to my car, but I did have to remove a crapload of feathers from the radiator.
blanx
I must shamefacedly confess that I too have committed aviacide, a small, gray bird that I hit while behind the wheel of a company pickup in Wyoming. Got a nasty look from a lady in the parking lot of the convenience store where I stopped to remove the bird from the grill. Jeez, it wasn’t like I deliberately ran it down or anything.
Not counting the birds killed in the pet store I crashed through during a high speed pursuit of a criminal mastermind on my last day on the force, I too have seen a poor tweety succumb to the temptation of suicide by car windshield.
The little guy just didn’t get up off the ground in time. As badly as I felt, I kept thinking to myself, “Gee, what are the odds of that?” It was kind of like hitting the roadkill jackpot. Anyone can nail a squirrel. But a bird?
In the height of summertime in Hampton VA, I arrived home to have my dad tell me that something was stuck on the grille of my Gremlin. We looked and initially thought it was a dead bird.
We were wrong.
It was a bat. :eek:
I remember seeing it swoop in front of the car and I just thought it was a large leaf.