Rooster Crashes-Cock A Doodle Flew

[Peter Hooper]

Add to the Songkran road toll - one large rooster. He started to run across the road from the right but unexpectedly took off about half way across and made enough height to clear the bonnet and crash heavily into the windscreen shattering it and filling the cab with glass & feathers. Every Australian schoolboy knows the safest way to make your ground is to stay low and run your bat along the ground. This chook was very impressive with long tail feathers and bright colours but short in the brains department and obviously never seen a game of cricket.
Had I been on the bike he would have caused some damage and may even have knocked me off, certainly wrecked my new windshield. The weight of impact at 100kph was very heavy. A dog or chook on the ground is one thing but in the air is much more dangerous.
Has anyone hit one on a bike ?
Cheers, Peter

"The Journey is the Destination"

 

[jonadda]

Not a chook but I have hit a bird, wore it in the chest, it didnt hurt but the splatter spray shot up inside my helmet "not pleasant"
On a trail ride in Australia i saw a startled kangaroo leap off an embankment accross the trail we were on taking out the rider in front of me mid flight, resulting in a broken collar bone.
John

 

[BobS]

Birds are easy. Try killing a deer with a bike. I did.

BobS

"The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right."

 

[2Up Chiang Khong]

The art of Chicken Dodging: While riding in Thailand, one of the major worries/hazards, is that of dogs running out onto the road and playing chicken with the rider. While riding in Laos, we found it was not the dogs, but rather Pigs ( oops – that’s a topic for another thread). OK we were talking about chickens. In Lao they are everywhere! When they hear you coming, they will run out to the road and then turn and run full pelt parrelel to the road until they are just about abreast of you and then they will contort and spin 90 degrees and dart out across in front of you. Generally they manage to survive the dart in front of you because you have laid heavily on the brakes and their timing is such, they are able to claw enough air to streak safely off across in front of you and out of harms way. With ABS brakes we managed to stay up right after each and every time of grabbing heavily onto the brakes, but after about a week of this, we started to tier of their game, and tried a different tactic. This being we simply kept going in the direction we wanted to go and if anything, even accelerated a bit. We found much to our delight that the chooks would still come rushing out to the road when they heard us coming, but instead of scratching air and twisting out in front of us, they would soon understand; hey these guys are not going to give us right of way and they – not us – would maneuver out of the way. So the lesson here was: when amongst the feathered fowl, it was damn the chooks and full speed ahead.

As for hitting a chook and possibly launching the rider as apposed to sending the bird off to where ever dead chooks go to, we found that range-fed chooks don’t have enough body mass to affect the balance of a fully loaded 1150RT going 2-up in full pelt…we did hit one and it was legless by the time the farmer got to it, or so my wife tells me as she twisted around on the seat to record events. Me – I was full speed ahead.

Cheers
David 2-Up