Back two gears at the 60km\/h sign heading into Bell eastbound early in Spring. There\u2019s often a copper hiding in the truck-weighing station. And there he is \u2013 side of the road \u2013 BEFORE the truck-weighing station.<\/p>\n
Glance at the speedo \u2013 65. OK. It\u2019s a bit optimistic, and the radar faces forward, of course; and I\u2019m not there yet. I trickle past at 55 indicated, feeling virtuous.<\/p>\n
BANG! Something has hit my helmet. I see my shadow out of the corner of my eye. There\u2019s a large bird hovering over my head. BANG!<\/p>\n
Screw this. I crouch,\u00a0twist the grip, the bike gathers speed. Shit. I\u2019m still in the\u00a0radar field.<\/p>\n
I twist my head and check out the Highway Patrol car in the mirror. He hasn\u2019t moved. Maybe he\u2019s wet himself. Maybe he\u2019s gone to sleep. Maybe he\u2019s having a donut induced type 2 diabetes attack. All of which are okay by me.<\/p>\n
Australian Magpies. I love ’em. Their\u00a0scientific name is something tibicen, which is Latin for flautist. They have a fabulous song. They are muscular, and walk tall, and their black and white plumage has the elegance of a dinner jacket. Their juveniles hang around in groups, and swagger, and look like something out of West Side Story; as if they should be smoking cigarettes and propositioning passing women.<\/p>\n
They have a reputation for attacking humans that come too close to their nests. I\u2019ve read about it, but never experienced it before. Apparently one of them killed a kid decades ago by driving a tetanus-infected beak into his skull.<\/p>\n
But I learned a valuable lesson that day. When they swoop, they have their undercarriage down \u2013 I could see the shadow of his legs. I reckon it would be a simple matter to grab him by the legs with the clutch hand, and smash his skull into the VFR’s\u00a0single sided swingarm.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all very well to have a fabulous song, but that\u2019s no reason to carry on like a mujahedin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They are muscular, and walk tall, and their black and white plumage has the elegance of a dinner jacket<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4728"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4728"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7671,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4728\/revisions\/7671"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}