Is it me or is the animal population of this country hell bent on committing ritual hari-kari?
Hardly a day seems to go by now without some furry or feathered creature running or swooping out in front of me as I’m driving along. It used to happen on the odd occasion but now it’s getting more and more frequent and I’m becoming paranoid.
After all, driving in this country is bad enough, what with traffic congestion, speed cameras, pot holes and the like, without having organised games of ‘chicken’ played out on the nation’s highways by every variety of animal except, well, chickens.
I regularly have to run a gauntlet of pheasants and ducks on the country lanes around where I live. They sit at the side of the road waiting for me to come along and then fly up in front of me at the last moment, causing me to brake, swerve or both. A couple of days ago three ducks not only took off right in front of me but proceeded to fly down the road ahead of me at windscreen level. It was like watching one of those nature programmes of birds in flight close-up.
A few weeks ago a young deer sprang out of the hedge and ran across the road. Fortunately I saw it out of the corner of my eye just before it leapt and was able to brake in time. Now this was in the middle of a village a long way from where the local deer normally reside so I know that it was a deliberate attempt by the animal to target me.
At least this wasn’t as frightening as the experience I had a few years ago. Driving back home late at night down a country road crossing some marshes, I suddenly saw a huge white face caught in the headlamps and rushing through the air towards me just a few feet above the ground. Believe me, it’s not the sort of thing you want to see at one o’clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately the owl, for this I realised at the last moment is what it was, swerved just before I did, otherwise I would have ended up in one of the ditches which bordered the road.
Now add all these encounters to the regular run of squirrels, cats, foxes, badgers and the like which take it upon themselves to occupy the same part of a road which I wish to, and you can begin to see why I’m finding it a little tiresome, to say nothing of spooky.
But nothing compares to the trepidation I feel whenever I venture to a certain part of the country where a sign warns me of ‘giant marsh frogs’. The first time I saw this I stopped and looked around nervously, expecting one of these amphibians to suddenly leap, kangaroo like, from a ditch and over my car. I’ve yet to actually see one do this, but nothing would surprise me.
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