Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?

This blog is putting together motorcycling and birdwatching, two hobbies not often linked, but that's Mary Ann's passion, and mine is motorcycling. So here goes.

My very earliest observation of birds while motorcycling came on my first motorcycle drive in Africa. I was new to motorcycling and new to driving in Africa, especially since I had to drive on the left. Once I got out of the city I noticed something that I never saw in Canada. It seemed that every mud hut had a few chickens out in the yard running around pecking the ground. Chickens to the left and chickens to the right of the road. As I approached, it seemed without fail, the chickens on the left took a run for the right side of the road, and the chickens to the right made a beeline for the left side of the road, in all cases narrowly escaping death. Before long, I was asking myself "Why do all the chickens  cross the road? They would have been perfectly safe in their yard pecking away. Then I realized that I had just put into words the best known joke in the English language. This chicken behaviour no longer happens in North America, but maybe it did years ago when people used to let chickens run free instead of locking them up in little boxes. I still don't know the real answer, but I assume that chickens must prefer to feast on the far side of the road, then panic at the sound of an approaching motorcycle, and run for home.

Next observation was from a bird found in Sierra Leone called a Night Jar. And a well named bird it was, as I found out riding at night on a gravel road. These birds have a tendency to sleep in dips in the road, and with an approaching motorcycle, will panic and fly up in the air, but just a bit too late to clear the motorcycle rider with the result that I often found myself riding along with a big flapping bird in my face. To this day I couldn't tell you what a Night Jar looks like in daylight, but I did have a lot of up close jarring encounters with them at night.

Back in Canada, I found something else interesting about birds. While riding a motorcycle, I often need to know which way the wind is blowing, and one way to tell is to watch birds taking flight. They always point directly into the wind to take off. It's useful to know that if you come upon a big vulture sitting in the middle of the road, you should aim for the downwind side of him, in case he takes off as you go by. At highways speed, you don't want to hit a vulture. By the way, you should also slow down, sometimes they make a very sharp 180 degree turn immediately on taking off.

More observations. Everyone has seen Canada geese parading slowly across the road blocking traffic, seemingly enjoying the car horns honking at them. For some reason, geese are not as brave about motorcycles. Once I was stuck behind three cars waiting for the geese. So I pulled out and passed all the cars. The geese saw the motorcycle coming and cleared off the road in a hurry. They might think of a motorcycle as more the sound and shape of a predator, where the cars are more like slow moving houses.

Once when Mary Ann was riding her Burgman down a road beside an Emu farm, the Emu on the other side of the fence decided to try to race her, and did a pretty good job of keeping up. I have also seen horses do try to race motorcycles, but I have never seen it done with a car. Maybe again the motorcycle looks more like another animal.