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What's the airspeed velocity of an unladen buck?
I was cycling with friends on a very rural road today when we heard squealing brakes followed by the sickening sound of a car hitting a large object.
I watched in disbelief as a deer somersaulted through the air in front of me, at least ten feet above the pavement, and landed in a ditch at the side of the road some 30 feet from where it had been hit. You know in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the French dudes catapult livestock over the castle walls onto King Arthur and his crew? That's just what it looked like, except in place of the catapult was a light blue Civic.
We stopped to see if the occupants of the car were OK. The driver got out to survey the large dent in the hood and said, "Yeah, we're fine, but I don't know about the deer."
Just then, the barbed-wire fence along the roadside ditch started to shake. And the deer sprang out of the ditch and bounded away! ("I'm not dead yet! I think I'll go for a walk." <snicker>) We could hardly believe our eyes that the impact with the car and subsequent landing hadn't broken every bone in its body. But no, just like Brave Sir Robin, the deer ran away.
September 24, 2005 4:37 PM
holy crap! that rivals the galloping mama-cow-about-to-do-a-U-turn-into-us ride experience from last spring. but as far as i know, the mama cow wasn't catapulted anywhere.
I've seen that too, a deer getting launched into the air by a car just a couple of blocks from my house. Unfortunately that Bambi wasn't quite so lucky, the whole thing was pretty disturbing all the way around.