Bike vs rabbit?

[spesh]

Most of us are too chicken to crack those and it's too scrambled to get a better yolk, I mean joke.









It's ok, I wasn't staying anyway.

That was fowl.

[Ben T]

Most of us are too chicken to crack those and it's too scrambled to get a better yolk, I mean joke.









It's ok, I wasn't staying anyway.

Yer coot's by the door, and don't tern round and come back.

[ElyDave]

We've all seen that squirrel vs carbon fork picture, haven't we?   

If you've got a sensible number of spokes that probably won't happen, so it probably comes down to whether you lose control from a sudden steering deflection or skid on the freshly splatted guts. 

I doubt anything fleshy is going to do well after being run over by a 100PSI road tyre, assuming a direct hit.  TBH, the rabbits that don't have a sensible diving-for-cover instinct tend to be the ones that look rather unwell to begin with.  Pheasants, OTOH, are suicidally stupid and I trust them even less than I trust plastic bags.

I had three Pheasants jump out of a Fenland ditch in front of me. Instead of heading across the open fen, the daft sods went straight across the road.  Very twitchy ar$e time.

The one thing that really needs to get brought out here is man vs bee.

I had a recent experience on the carbon frame rocket of being about 3km from home doing about 20-22mph when I saw a haze on the road.  As I got closer it resolved itself, too late by far, into a swarm of bees.  20mph man vs bee impact is not insubstantial, but after the impact damage you then have the 20 or so bees clinging to your jersey, shorts, leg hair, socks, shoes.  I took at least three or four stings on one leg before swiping and swatting the little bast@rds off me, as I waved and waggled across the road.  White van man coming the other way looked more surprised than I was.

[Ben T]

When I used to work in Derby there were quite a lot of bees on the cycle path, on the ground. All hugely fat. Some alive, some dead. My theory is they are too fat to fly and got run over by cyclists.

[rogerzilla]

I hit a pigeon on the A420 with a 160psi racing tyre - the rear wheel went straight over it.  I didn't stop to look. as a long convoy of "travellers" were trying to do the same thing to me at the time.  I actually had to get off the road into a lay-by just after Acorn Bridges to let them pass.  Beware Transit vans towing caravans, especially if there are ten of them.

On the subject of bees, I once hit a very large bumblebee at 40mph near Henley-in-Arden, back in the days when I wore a helmet more often.  There was a very loud "donk" sound and I actually felt the impact - not bad for something that only weighs a couple of grams.

[Bledlow]

I once ran over a squirrel. It ran out of vegetation at the side of the road, straight under my back wheel. Broke its back (I heard it crack), but it scrambled into cover, paralysed back legs dragging, before I could put it out of its misery.

[mzjo]

Wasps in motorcycle helmets on a motorway can be very "interesting" as well. Chevreuils are a bit of a hazard here as they are unpredictable and rather more solid than rabbits and squirrels but they don't generally hang around in the road. Snakes always frighten me a bit. I never know whether they are the dangerous ones and how they are going to react (not being mammals).