Sorry, I was making a funny. Or trying to, at least. C’mon, didn’t it sound a little like any given crappy 80’s buddy-cop film? Well, that’s what I was shooting for. (miss!) If only my life really were that exciting…
::MachV contemplates telling wild stories to make his online persona sound cooler than he really is…Nah!::
Nope, hitting the bird was pretty much the highlight of my life! 
(and now I feel bad, since that really would have been a cool story!)
We don’t hit birds, they hit US!
In one week, I managed to lower the bird population by 4!
This was quite a few years ago and I was driving a Chevette at the time. Amazingly, there was no damage, but I certainly expected it with the force of those little birdies hitting my windows!
It started on a Monday–I was driving to work, not mile from my house when out of the blue I hear a loud WHAP! I look in my rearview mirror to see a small bird cartwheeling through the air.
Two days later, at the same stretch of road, two little birds are doing loop-de-loops after each other in front of me. Both slammed into my car - one on each side - simultaneously.
Two days after that, I manage to get almost to the end of this famed road when out of nowhere a bird came dive bombing - kamikaze (sp?) style into the front driver’s side of my car! All I could see was this one wing stretched waaaay out like he was waving at me from my headlamp. As I came to the stop sign, he sort of slid – wiggling style (like a cartoon) down off the front of my car. I did have to laugh at that. I was mighty afraid I’d have bird guts all over my car, but all there was, was a tiny blop of blood.
I was starting to think I should keep a bird stamp in my car and start stamping my car for every bird I hit!
What a week! Haven’t hit one since – though I suppose I’ve now jinxed myself.
Some of the stories I’ve read here remind me of the Seinfeld episode where George hits a flock of pigeons and then a squirrel with his car and at one point runs through another flock of pigeons and squashes one with his feet! That episode always cracks me up!
I once ran over a bird on my motorcyle.
A flock of sparrows were swarming about 5" above the road. I figured they’d clear away by the time I got there, but this one especially stupid one swerved left, right, left, center, and I nailed it.
Both wheels.
I hit a small one on my way home from scuba diving. There I was, trundling along the winding highway through rolling green hills and wildflowers, glorying in the gorgeousness of the day, and SPLAT! Right above the rear-view mirror. I’m pretty sure I brained the poor thing.
There still a significant bit of intact smear left where it hit the windshield, and this happened in May. May of 2001.
My father, brother and I were driving home from opal mining in the ‘outback’ when a parrot flew directly into the car’s windscreen. It hit the glass with a thud and appeared to bounce over the car. We pulled over so the driver could wipe the big smear off the windscreen and then continued home. At least four hours later we got home and started unpacking the car, including the roof racks. Imagine our surprise to find the bird jammed between the rack and the roof of the car, cold and stiff. We all laughed at the time, but it was kind of sad.
This is from the Last Page, Motocyclist, in Sept. 1991:
I hit a small yellow bird once on the highway, saw it swooping in from the left and never saw it leave on the right. I didn’t think much of it until the day after I’d gotten to my destination and saw a yellow splotch in my grill. I pulled out the pretty much intact bird and then, unfortunately, the dog grabbed it and ran off.
I drove under an overpass as a pigeon dipped too low and I saw the tell tale puff of feathers. I felt sick when it happened. But I don’t know if it disappeared or what, I saw the feathers but could not find the corpse on my car or on the road when I stopped to make sure he wasn’t still suffering. I don’t know what I would have done had he been suffering, but I wanted to know if the death had been quick and painless.
In addition to being an all around menace to small creatures on the highway, I one killed Robin Redbreast with a golf ball on a drive from the first tee at the University of Iowa’s Finkbine Golf Course.
73 mph, down a long straight away on a backroad in my town with a couple of my friends. im in the back, and all of a sudden i hear a “BAM!”. My freind Grant jumps up from his seat infront of me laughing his ass off, while Suzy, the driver, is like “Did I just hit what I thought I hit?”
I guess the bird wanted to play a little game of chicken with her car and hit the frame in the corner where the windshield ends and the hood begins. i remember seeing blood fly in directions and a limp, winged body just floating in the air for a few seconds, then hit the ground. we got out and poked it with sticks. i took a couple pictures too.
[/american beauty freak]It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen…[end /american beauty freak]
I once killed a pelican while driving a 1969 Buick Wildcat—a four door hardtop, the best road car I ever owned. I was coming back from Key West and topped a bridge at about 70mph. The pelican was crossing the road at grill height and there was nothing I could do. It was sort of like a feathered bomb exploding when I hit it. The was a dull “thud,” a cloud of feathers and, after a stunned silence, great hilarity among the passengers and crew.
The Buick was unharmed, but that was to be expected. It was sort of an automotive locomotive and virtually indestructible. It played hell with the pelican, though, and it took a lot of cleaning.
Yes and it was horrible. I could see this bird ahead, obviously injured in some way. My son’s shouting, “Mummy, Mummy! Don’t hit the bird!” but it was slap-bang in the middle of the road and with heavy traffic coming the other way I had no way of avoiding it. Looking in the rear-view mirror after hitting it I saw it spinning/rolling to the side of the road - just like you see on the telly when someone leaps from a moving car.
Not a patch on my mother-in-law’s “cow incident” when she was learning to drive though.
Do tell!!!
-Dao, who’s having way too much fun reading this thread.
Heh. Many years ago my MIL is learning how to drive and my FIL is teaching her. They go out one day round the country lanes with my husband and his two sisters in the back. Now my MIL is one of those nervous kind of people so when everbody starts shouting for her to stop, that there’s a cow in the lane, it unnerves her a little. So rather than hitting the brake (you guessed it) she hits the accelerator. Cue cow sprawled across the bonnet with its face pressed against the windscreen. Everyone apart from MIL is hysterical with laughter, she’s screaming “get the cow off the car!”. Then, rather than stopping, she starts swerving manically, hoping to fling the cow off the bonnet (obviously had watched Starsky & Hutch the night before).
This was about fifteen years ago and people still talk about it now!
Quite a few times, actually. Every time has been the same, though. Bird is standing in the road, directly in the path of my oncoming car. It doesn’t decide to fly away until im about a foot in front of it and flies straight up into the bottom of my bumper. Gah, thats happened about 4 or 5 times.
I ran over the world’s dumbest bird. I was backing into a parking space at 1-2 mph. I saw it in the rear view, and figured there’s no way I would hit it since I was going so slow and the bird obviously had time to notice that I was backing up.
SPLAT
Wrong.
Raccoons get hit in my neighborood more than anything, my father took out three or four driving on back raods at night.
He tried to stop, or there was no place to swerve to, and we usually see a couple of new dead raccoons every day on two particular roads. It makes me wonder if Indiana has suicidal raccoons.
I was returning from a trip two years ago with some friends. We had gone on a birdwatching trip and were about five miles from home. Out of nowhere a bird flew up and hit the windshield. Of course being good birders we all yelled “Western Meadowlark” simultaneously…rather then what normal people would do. The only damage was to the bird :(.
Keith