Gday guys,
In my experience, birds are agile animal, they sometimes feed on the road and fly away just before cars came by.
Often, they dance with danger by dodging the cars on the last second, and got away clean.

Since last year's Christmas, on hunting trips I drove over 4000 kms, and during the time, I run over 6 birds (killed everyone of them).
I have never run onto birds before in my 30+ years of driving, just these last few months they seems to get the urge to meet my bumper bar..

I have not giving it a mind for a while until this morning, on the way to work (7km drive),
I saw TWO birds got run over by two separate cars on two different occasions.

What the hell is going on?

Wow that's a lot of suicidal birds. I had one pick up that seemed to be a bird magnet, I have only smacked a couple since I traded that one in.

Back in '79 I bought a new yellow Mustang. The very first time I drove it a FLOCK of birds flew into it while I was doing about 60 mph. It sounded like a shotgun blast hitting the car! No damage to the car but there were a lot of feathers flying! Since then I've gotten a couple more birds and one night I heard a thump and found a blonde bat stuck in the grill when I got home.

Now my daughter swears that there is a squirrel suicide cult living right down the road from here...

clipped a valley quail coming home from getting zilched on a hunt on hwy 138. not an authorized method of take per the state but..it wasnt intentional so..i got dinner and didnt have to clean the gun! woot!

Birds are actually a very real problem around here on the roads. By birds I mean pheasants. They are ever present in the mornings and evening picking up gravel on the shoulders of the roads. If you ever hit one at top speed, you are likely to loose a grill or windshield, headlights etc. If you happen to drive with your drivers side window down you could be taken out by a low level pheasant flying across the road right at window height. Many a bird has struck the person driving a car with there window down.
All this being said. We are tickeled to death to have this many pheasants in our area.

I'd only ever hit one bird up until I bought my current car.

The first bird I hit was an owl, and it landed spread eagle into the middle of my widscreen, then bounced over the top of the car and hit my brother, riding behind me on his 1942 WLA 45 cu in Harley, square in the chest . This was at night and the windscreen maybe had a silver sheen to it, which leads me to my current car which is silver. On a 4000km round trip to Mt Isa from Brisbane, we hit maybe four or five birds, and like Gelan said...they just didn't seem to get out of the way. I've also had many near misses with this car as well.

All this leads me to think that the problem for birds may well be the colour of the vehicle.

Cheers, Vince

If its only recently that this has been happening then I say

"Climate Change"

...or Global Warming.

I think we been listening to Gillard too much mate.

Cheers, Vince

Have to agree with moose2 on the pheasants, and around here the hawks are really getting to be a problem. Last fall I was coming home from work and on the road was 6 turkey vultures gathered around a carcass that did not move as I approached them and had to actually drive around them.

Vince, Tikka, have you guys heard that there are thousand of dead fish off Bourke today?
Its on the ABC news www.abc.net.au/news/st...163937.htm

Mate, looks like NSW gonna be like Kalifornica soon..
Stovie gonna feel "at home" with those fish stink and all.

WOW...a "coincidence"? Maybe...maybe not, who knows. Only time will tell.

Cheers, Vince

Check out this story from Bear Lake, Idaho.

Eagle Crash

ouch... we get alot of mallards squashed in the springtime dopey on grass from roadside or flying low doing the mating dance.