Jeff, the Bird Whisperer

Jeff continues to claim that one of his favorite parts of living here is his commute, the daily bike ride of 20 km of which a beautiful portion runs alongside the huge Amsterdam/Rhine shipping canal. It's an odd mix of bucolic serenity -- gardens in which roosters crow at all hours, some woodlands where you can actually watch pheasants running around -- and postmodern industrial -- at one point there's a conveyor belt that actually unloads sand and gravel from the barges about 10 feet over the bikers' heads. Most important, there's only been one instance in which the winds were so strong that he was blown perilously close to losing his bike in the 60-foot-deep canal in the wee hours of the morning. Usually they just blow him in drunken wobbles all over the path like the rest of the riders.

After he got home last night, the kids were regaling him with stories of their day (like the guy roped to the tree outside the school playground who was hoisting himself into the wee branches with a running chainsaw holstered to his belt -- worker's comp waiting to happen, I say). Then Jeff remembered, excited, that he had one of his own to share.

"What," I asked, selecting a comically implausible scenario, "you got hit by a bird riding down the bike path?"

A pause.

"Actually, yes," he replied, deflated. As I sat there agape, he launched into the story anyway.

The weather was gorgeous; it was only the second time he's been able to ride to work without a coat. There he was on a portion of the path where the trees line either side, riding along, minding his own business. Then he felt something -- sharp somethings -- grab the back of his head and quickly release. Still pedaling, he whipped around in time to see the culprit land in the tree behind him -- a black bird with some markings. His first thought was, "That'd better not be a crow. I'm not in the mood for omens." His second thought was, "That bird's one lucky bugger because there are days when I'd turn around and find a rock." (Jeff is, incidentally, gifted with an almost supernatural precision with hand-borne projectiles.)

The funniest part: as he described the bird, we realized it was a magpie. Magpies, which are very common around here, are notorious sluts for shiny objects. Hate to say it, but it was going for the sunset glinting off Jeff's balding pate. Sigh. Looks like hats will be de rigeur if he hopes to avoid being carried off by a mischief of magpies. (Er, and that's not Jeff in the photo in case you were wondering...)

Edificatory Postscript: Who knew that magpies had so many collective nouns to describe them (along the lines of "a murder of crows")? I thought I remembered "mischief" but I wasn't sure, so I got curious and tried to look it up and found the following list of terms for groups of magpies:

a charm, a congregation, a flock, a gulp, a mischief, a murder, a tiding, a tidings (is that a double collective?), a tittering, a tribe

Edificatory Postscript the Second: Holy moly, turns out magpies are notorious attackers of bikers and this is their open season on Homo sapiens. People have put actual thought into preventing the aggressive little buggers from divebombing them (all these links are Australian since I'm assuming most of you don't read Dutch). Looks like Jeff got off easy, particularly since he hadn't taken the recommended measure of wearing an ice cream container on his head (scroll down slightly to the section "How to avoid being attacked").