jeremy.id.au

It was a nice sunny 18˚C in Melbourne today. We’ve had warmer in the last couple of weeks, none the less, it is the first day of spring and what better way to celebrate than spending some time in the outdoors. A lot of people were out walking their dogs, others kicking soccer balls around at the local park and I happened to be out on my bike.

Riding along, enjoying the fresh (well most likely polluted) city air, when suddenly I was hit from behind by a terrorising magpie. Normally it is rather trivial matter being swooped while cycling; more of a nuisance that is. Bike helmets may not do much to protect cyclists from the menace of cars (some say they actually create more danger), though they usually prove quite effective in the defence against swooping magpies in the springtime. This time, however, the magpie bypassed the defence of my helmet by going for the back of my neck, attacking at the weakest point of contact.

Fortunately, however, I got off lightly. Although it hurt for a while, it left no signs of damage. Some people describe the experience of magpies more accurately as this:

‘Trivial and humorous’ is definitely not how many people now regard aggressive magpies. For them, the advent of spring is a time of daily terror and anguish, of real fear and th ever-present feeling of imminent danger.

Well I certainly won’t take this extreme and to me they are still something more of a nuisance… though they certainly seem to be increasing their terrorism tactics. The worst day I had for bird attacks on my bike was actually way back in September 2000 when I got swooped several in one day. Fortunately they all attacked on the helmet that day, rather than my neck.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Cycling, Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.