Strewth. I don’t know what my reaction to that would be, I wouldn’t expect it to be a catch. You never know though - it happens without any thinking process. I did bat a small bird away once - the small birds pair up and play ‘chicken’ - waiting in hedges or on walls and fly across the front of you. I assume trying to be the last one to take off. The learner ones aim lower so that there is less to hit them if they cock it up. They can land safely on the road between the wheels, the practised one have found the fun in animing higher and riding the slipstream up the windscreen. On this occasion pair of birds waited too long. The first did a U turn mid air - very impressive. That alerted me to the second one that was heading straight for my open helmet, and I batted it away. I hadn’t got a clue what had just happened, it was so fast but then I got a slow motion replay of it all.
We have grouse and pheasants in the Yorkshire Dales. They are the ESN section of the bird population- that is Educationally Sub Normal.
Intelligence is measured in planks, and these creatures are as thick as two short ones. They sit on walls next to roads - just because they can. There is one particular stretch where they like to gather - because there is a bit of an area where a vehicle can get two wheels off the road, and someone regularly dumps something on the other side of the wall that attracts these pheasants. They have developed the ability to take off vertically. At the sight of any danger eg a car or a lorry/truck they jump up into the air and then seem to stay there as they flap frantically, and then start flying forward.
They have not yet worked out that this is deadly instinct for them because they tend to sit facing the traffic. So their VTOL ability creates a flight path straight across the windscreen of the car or truck or motorcycle that startled them. The slipstream effect doesn’t work for them - they are about the size of chickens, and they are not going to be swept up and over by the invisible wave that smaller birds like to surf. They cannot learn from each other because the secret of how to do it incorrectly has disappeared with the startling display of squashed brown, red, blue and turquoise tarmac plumage. Drawing the connection between that and how it got there is beyond them.
Eventually evolution will win out as the only ones left will be the ones that have not developed this behaviour. But that gene pool seems to be quite small.
Catching a pheasant Igofar fashion, or even deflecting one, isn’t an option. I cannot imagine what damage that something the size of a frozen chicken hitting my helmet at 60mph could do, but it isn’t going to be pretty. Catching a cricket ball before you learn to move with it hurts badly enough, a 7lb chicken? No, I don’t want to develop that reflex reaction. I once had a conversation with my father-in-law about reflexes. He spotted that when I dropped something off my workbench I instinctively broke its fall with my foot, to prevent any damage. He had developed the opposite reaction. His dad was a butcher !
No - keeping a good look out, raising the windscreen and ducking seems to have worked for me so far, but these birds are sneaky. They have started to sit not in top of the wall, but to use one of the characteristic of Yorkshire Dales Dry Stone Walks - that of providing little ledges all the way to the top. So they now sit on these on the other side of the wall with only their head sticking up. And being ESN, that’s quite a small head. The first you see of them is their initial leap up as they squawk-ack-ack-ack-ack and then fly across to get close and personal with your helmet. I don’t wait. I ride that section of road tucked well down behind the screen. The screen wouldn’t survive , but I might.
But that bar - strewth. You wouldn’t have had time for your brain to say oh, that’s a bar, catch it. It probably just happened ? If you did see it before hand that is even more impressive.
We have grouse and pheasants in the Yorkshire Dales. They are the ESN section of the bird population- that is Educationally Sub Normal.
Intelligence is measured in planks, and these creatures are as thick as two short ones. They sit on walls next to roads - just because they can. There is one particular stretch where they like to gather - because there is a bit of an area where a vehicle can get two wheels off the road, and someone regularly dumps something on the other side of the wall that attracts these pheasants. They have developed the ability to take off vertically. At the sight of any danger eg a car or a lorry/truck they jump up into the air and then seem to stay there as they flap frantically, and then start flying forward.
They have not yet worked out that this is deadly instinct for them because they tend to sit facing the traffic. So their VTOL ability creates a flight path straight across the windscreen of the car or truck or motorcycle that startled them. The slipstream effect doesn’t work for them - they are about the size of chickens, and they are not going to be swept up and over by the invisible wave that smaller birds like to surf. They cannot learn from each other because the secret of how to do it incorrectly has disappeared with the startling display of squashed brown, red, blue and turquoise tarmac plumage. Drawing the connection between that and how it got there is beyond them.
Eventually evolution will win out as the only ones left will be the ones that have not developed this behaviour. But that gene pool seems to be quite small.
Catching a pheasant Igofar fashion, or even deflecting one, isn’t an option. I cannot imagine what damage that something the size of a frozen chicken hitting my helmet at 60mph could do, but it isn’t going to be pretty. Catching a cricket ball before you learn to move with it hurts badly enough, a 7lb chicken? No, I don’t want to develop that reflex reaction. I once had a conversation with my father-in-law about reflexes. He spotted that when I dropped something off my workbench I instinctively broke its fall with my foot, to prevent any damage. He had developed the opposite reaction. His dad was a butcher !
No - keeping a good look out, raising the windscreen and ducking seems to have worked for me so far, but these birds are sneaky. They have started to sit not in top of the wall, but to use one of the characteristic of Yorkshire Dales Dry Stone Walks - that of providing little ledges all the way to the top. So they now sit on these on the other side of the wall with only their head sticking up. And being ESN, that’s quite a small head. The first you see of them is their initial leap up as they squawk-ack-ack-ack-ack and then fly across to get close and personal with your helmet. I don’t wait. I ride that section of road tucked well down behind the screen. The screen wouldn’t survive , but I might.
But that bar - strewth. You wouldn’t have had time for your brain to say oh, that’s a bar, catch it. It probably just happened ? If you did see it before hand that is even more impressive.
