BX v Magpie who won?

[kiwi]

The Magpie did I think

The amount of small birds that over he summer months have had a death wish flying into cars, trucks and buses or exploding superbugs on the windscreen. I knd of got used to that but sooner or later it had to happen!

A blardy Magpie a bit slow on the take off from the road as I bore down on it at 100kph. Heard to thud and checked the mirror to see it spraying feathers off to the side of the road and then it got up

Me being the guilty type not to leave an injured creature at the side of the road went back to check, need not worry though tough old bird looks like it was just winded as it flew off with its mate as I got close to it

However the BX had not faired so well as I have noticed a hole in the nearside indicator plastic, Caused by that blardy bird as it hit the car

[mat_fenwick]

Bird are tougher than you might think, I was on my bike at about 40mph going through France a few years back when a pigeon flew out of the bushes right in front of me and hit me right in the chest. I slowed down, gasping for breath and twisted to one side, expecting to see its body drop away. But no, the bloody thing just flew off as if nothing had happened. Whereas I was bruised and winded despite my leathers...

[Linegeist]

Magpies are tough and wily birds. They are also vicious predatory creatures, that will empty an entire hedgerow of bird chicks just for fun. When a bunch of Magpies moves into an area, they will rapidly decimate the songbird population by killing off the chicks.

For that reason they are on the DEFRA list of vermin species that can be shot. Sadly, our society nowadays considers it somehow wrong to cull a species that predates on another helpless species in order to maintain some kind of balance. This is why the fox population has exploded and urban rats are multiplying rapidly.

However, in order to preserve the bird population that we've carefully built in our rural garden over the the years, I regularly introduce Magpies to the joys of lead suppositories and do so with considerable satisfaction.

So far this year, I've already removed 11 of the blasted things from the local food chain. I don't what the ballistic coefficient of a speeding BX is, but Magpies don't bounce back from a 17grain PCP slug at 29fpe.

EDIT: Some years ago, a chum of mine hit a pheasant at high speed (+60mph)on a Lincolnshire country lane. He managed to limp to our house (when we lived in Lincs) with the pheasant embedded deep in his Micra's radiator, its arse sticking out of the front of the car like some kind of obscenely feathered assegai. It wrecked the rad - pulling out the buggered pheasant unblocked the ruined matrix and caused a major leak and we had to fit a new rad to get him home.

Perhaps this is why pheasant're so bloody chewy............

[Philip Chidlow]

I took off my Toyota MR2's aerial with a pigeon!

[kiwi]

Magpies are tough and wily birds. They are also vicious predatory creatures, that will empty an entire hedgerow of bird chicks just for fun. When a bunch of Magpies moves into an area, they will rapidly decimate the songbird population by killing off the chicks.

The referance to Magpies is the Australiasian version of the species. Although they share the same characteristics of the European Magpie. However these Magpies have a very tough rival to deal with in the native Tui, kind keeps a balance. However the Tui is a protected species pretty tough bugger it wont think twice about chasing off a several magpies on its own

[kiwi]

I took off my Toyota MR2's aerial with a pigeon!

Now you reminded me of the crow that decided to play chicken with me on my first BX way back in Cornwall. Flew straight down the road at me impacted the bonnet (cracking it), then hit the Aerial mount denting the roof before disintegrating as it was sucked into the spoiler at the rear. Man I remember those feathers and the flippin mess it made.

Back to this Magpie incident its not just cracked the indicator it has actually knocked out the headlight alignment as well.