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Journal nizo's Journal: Weirdest/biggest roadkill? 22

Journal by nizo

I haven't ever hit anything big, but I have hit a few strange things:

Once while driving at night, I hit what at first looked like a bird, but was in fact a bat. The weird part was it sounded like a wet potato when it hit the windshield (much denser than I would expect a bat to be). A few swipes of the windshield wipers and he was gone, poor little bug eater. Upon hitting the bat I of course had to ask the hex wife, "What was the last thing that bat saw before he died?" The correct answer of course is, "his butt".

One other time I was driving in the middle of bumfuck, NM in the late evening when I saw a small brush fire about half a mile from the road. It looked like the smoke was trailing across the road, but I quickly discovered it was actually a huge cloud of moths (or "millers" as the locals call them; not sure why) apparently flying to their doom. Anyway they made a nice mess on my windshield as I plowed through them at 80mph; at least I saved some of them from a fiery death (death by splatting seems much more humane).

So what has everyone else run over lately?

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Weirdest/biggest roadkill? More

Weirdest/biggest roadkill?

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  • On the NY State Thruway many years ago. It got caught in between the top of the wheel inside of the wheel well on my pickup. Bounced around a whole lot. Scared the living bejabbers out of me. I don't think the possum liked it much either.
    • Those little buggers run suprisingly fast. I don't know how many close calls I have had with them (back when I lived in NC).
      • Yeah, I'm amazed I haven't actually hit any of them yet. They seem to have an unnatural attraction to head lights.

        For me, I don't think I've ever hit anything (alive) aside from bugs. However...one time we were driving to a hockey game, I saw some a recently deceased cat on the highway well ahead of me. I started to drift left to try to avoid hitting it with the tires when I realized there wasn't enough room. So I began to turn right instead.

        Too late.

        *Thu-dunk*

        The wife sitting next to me had an incredulous
  • I once hit a turtle. A bump and it was flat as a pancake. Reminded me of a turtle that got ran over in a cartoon.
    And similar to your 'miller' story... When the cicadas returned, driving through a swarm of them mating on the highway left me going into a car washing machine (never used them before... much rather do it at home, but I didn't feel like dealing with so much bug guts).
  • I hit a deer and an owl. Neither died. The owl bled a little.
  • We used to eat all the deer, moose, and elk that people hit near our place in Kaslo, BC - ok, it was about 15 miles north of there, more than 100 miles north of the border.

    People even hit cows.

    I don't think I've killed much via vehicle (as opposed to my time in the Army), other than bugs. Sometimes could barely see out the windshield.

  • I was coming back from work late one night and I saw possum up ahead, eating something in the road. I had plenty of time to slow down and swerve, so I did. He did the typical possum thing - all over the road, no idea where to go. I slowed down to about 35 (limit was 55 there), and eased all the way over into the other lane, since I was the only one on the road. As I passed it, he ran under my car. Thump-thump. The mext morning, the vultures were cleaning up the possum and the previous roadkill.

    That was on

    • In defense of the animals, I try to imagine what it must be like from their perspective:

      Imagine standing out in a field, when all of a sudden you see this gigantic building sized thing racing towards you at 150mph, weaving in such a way that you can't tell where it will go next. It is so noisy you can barely think straight, and you have no idea which way to run to hide from it. You blindly start to run but suddenly, it is right on top of you and *splorch* you die.

      Then again these animals have brains the siz

  • Armadillos (I used to aim for those till I got one caught in the duals on my front drive axle a couple of weeks ago just north of Jacksonport, AR), deer, dogs and cats (I try not to hit those, but sometimes it's a choice between hitting them and losing control of the truck)...birds, millions of bugs...

    No in-laws or illegal immigrants yet, but I'm working on it ;-)
  • Yep I hit a duck- in downtown Sunnyvale, CA. Not a pond, lake or river for miles. Indeed I was on a road that had four lanes going in each direction, breaking up the Bay Area monotony of mini-malls and chain-restaraunts. So as I'm merrily cruising along this duck swoops down in front of my truck.
    *QUACK*
    *THUMP*
    I pulled over and looked around but the duck was simply gone. Not even a feather smear anywhere. In fact if it weren't for the cracked grill there would have been no proof that I had hit anythi
  • dog lived, dove was toast
  • Coming down a backroad home from drinking with Bodak one evening, kind of a wet and rainy evening. The backroad goes through some low lying farm and swamp areas near the intercoastal waterway. I come around the corner in my Explorer and see ahead what looks like the road kind of moving from my right to my left. Right when we got up to them is when we realized it was lots and lots of frogs hopping across the road from one side of the swamp to another.
  • Not exactly lately - more like a couple years ago. Coming home late at night and had one dash across the road in front of me. I've more recently seen another pair (not roadkill) slipping into the storm drain around the corner from my house. They're surprisingly big - like a very wide and fat house cat.

    Other roadkill, but not mine - my brother hit a seagull that waited longer than the rest of his buddies to take flight. Musta been a dare gone wrong. :P
  • I'm getting out of practice. Last week I only hit 16 grannies.

    Hmmm, anyone for a game of Carmageddon?

    Cheers,

    Ethelred

  • This past friday night my partner and I went to the beach, 380 km from Buenos Aires, on bus. To give you an idea, the kind of bus I'm speaking of is a Brazilian-made double-decker, a good 30 m in length, three axles, business-class-ish couches (narrow, but they can be tilted back to a 30 deg angle, and with the leg rest, you can sleep quite well), seats 60, and at a hundred km/h, it makes the trip in about 4 'n a half hours. And it costs less than US$ 15.

    Anyway, mid-trip, violent deceleration, a muffled

  • I don't know if this counts because it wasn't so much that I hit the squirrel but that the squirrel hit me...

    I was driving my car a few months ago and just ahead of me a bird of prey launches itself from the side of the road carrying a small squirrel. The bird apparently figured out that the weight of the squirrel was keeping it from getting high enough before my car arrived and dropped the squirrel on my hood and just barely missed being hit. The poor squirrel bounced off my car, I like to think that it

  • Mine: The usual squirrels and birds. I've always tried to avoid it, but it happens.

    Not mine: Last year my sister-not-quite-in-law bagged a deer with a 30 million grain bullet moving at about 70 FPS. Theirs is an economical family, so we had roadkill venison steak a couple weeks later.

    Legendary: My brother used to tell stories of his Oregon State fraternity gang going out 'possum stomping in the hills near Corvallis. (This seems gratuitously horrible now, but I was only 10 when he told the tale.) Unsatisfied
  • And what seems like a joke because of the whole "In soviet russia", but not what anyone has run over but what have you been hit by?

    Many of my friends have stories for me about being hit by deer. My really close friend was away at school and he told me how he was driving down this populated road with mini-malls and all sorts of stores and out of nowhere this deer comes and plows into his car. He stopped and the deer looked at him after the deer hit the car then just went prancing off.

    It was kind of fun

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