so come on guys and gals, what was the biggest furry/feathered impact and did you manage to stay shinny side up? if when im out and about i see johny fieldmouse crossing the road i would have no doubts about who had right of way.But what if it was miss tiggywinkle, sammy squirrel or peter rabbit, what size is cut off point? can you run a sheep over with a goldwing and a weasel with an rv125 when is a  swerving manouvre more dodgy than an impact........ your thoughts please

Speedy Claire from Bike Chat (and very occasionally here too) had a nasty encounter with a pheasant on a CBR600 about three years ago. She finally had an op last month to rectify the last of the damage - 'nuff said.
I've hit a rabbit on the bike without anything drastic happening to me. Don't know how the rabbit did though.
Riding through the suburbs at night, the main hazards are the rabbits and the foxes. I certainly wouldn't like to hit a fox at any speed.
I also encountered a deer on the M180 near Scunthorpe in the dawn light. Now that could have been seriously nasty - gave it a very wide and careful berth.

Pheasant, the first time out on my own. It flew head height along side me for nearly a mile! I wasn't a happy bunny I can tell you, stupid bloody bird! (Not me, the feathered one). I had to pull over in the end and turn round to get rid of the sodding thing!                                                                                                                                                                             

I hit a rabbit whilst doing about 90mph on a local lane one evening and apart from a bit of a thump-thump as I rode over poor little Peter, nowt really happened and I was absolutely fine.   The rabbit however was truly gutted!!   I also had a friend who had to replace his headlight after an owl flew straight into one night!  Apparently the bird was still pretty much intact ......... dead, but intact!                                                                                                                                                                             

hahaa  dead but intact                                                                                                                                                                              

"90mph on a local lane...." They dint teach me that at CBT training !!       My brother's been biking for over 25 yrs, including some combo racing, and had not had any major offs, then went to Cypress, hired a small bike on the 2nd day of a week's holiday and hit a dog !   That was 4  yrs ago, and he's just had another op on his shoulder!    Dunno wot happened to the dog, probs med a nice kebab for someone..                                                                                                                                                                               

Very unlikely that something will hit u, so best not to worry about it, otherwise u will never go much above walking pace. And should summat run out, u prob won't have time to do owt. Best just concentrate on what u can see - like cars at junctions - rather than worry unduly about wot u can't see. Ride defensively, but not OTT.                                                                                                                                                                             

I once had a bumble fly into my helmet on motorway and try to tunnel down my ear canal.Pulled up very swiftly on hard shoulder and got helmet off pronto. Avoided getting stung! Other end of scale was about a month ago near collision with 2 deer on Ullapool road at 1 in morning and managed to stop and gave them a wide berth, they were auditioning for riverdance prancing all over the place LOL!                                                                                                                                                                              

XK is absolutely right - don't want to scary any new riders or anything, but consider this ......   Us lot with some advanced training (spoken with a posh, nose in the air voice lol), will know about the "dead zone".  This is a very poorly thought out name given to the area of road ahead of you that you can't do anything about.   Basically, everyone has a reaction time, which is normally around 0.7 seconds.  This is the time it takes for your eyes to observe an obstacle in front of you, pass that information to your brain, for your brain to register the hazard, decide on the best course of action and send the electrical signal to your body to react.   Not long at all you may say!  And indeed to do all this in just 0.7 seconds is very impressive and shows why we are so incredible as a machine.   However, the human body isn't designed to travel at 100 or 60mph, or even 30mph and whilst riding along you travel roughly one foot per mile an hour of your speed in that 0.7 seconds.   So at 30mph, you travel 30 feet, at 100mph, you travel 100 feet etc.  Also, because this is the time it takes you to react, if anything happens within this distance, you won't even have time to react.  If something happens in half this distance, your brain won't even register!!   So say your following a truck at 40mph and you are 35 feet behind it.  If something then falls off the back of the truck, hits the road in front of you and doesn't bounce out of the way or similar, you'll hit it - simple as that, nowt you can do about it.   If you are less than 20 feet behind the truck, you probably won't even know what you hit!!   The simple answer to all this, is keep your distance, plan as early as possible and don't worry about anything happening within your "dead zone" cos if owt does happen there's absolutely nowt you can do about it anyway!!!                                                                                                                                                                             

Imagine what it's like for a train driver. Mate of mine used to be a union official on the railways, and when he wasn't arguing with the management, a lot of his job was working with the human resources people trying to straighten out drivers who'd seen someone on the tracks a distance ahead and been utterly unable to prevent the collision.
Some drivers would be able to go back to work the next day, while others would need weeks of help and support before taking the controls. Makes my blood run a bit cold, really.

so one is def planning ahead, to get some more training! and to improve on ones distance estimating skills!                                                                                                                                                                             

Well I have hit the ground once or twice stopping to put my foot down on icy or snowy roads, hit by a pheasant in the car once thought it was coming through the wind screen never new glass could bend and shake so much.   Some things I've nearly hit while driving my wagon, the whole rear axle and wheels off a wagons trailer in the middle of the M62 at night that was scary, sixth sense or something a blackness in the road, avoid, but the real scary thing was finding the wagon which had lost it's rear trailer axle still driving along at full tilt with sparks going every where a few mile later, did he even know, we tryed telling him.   Another was when we broke down outside Bradford and a tow truck came to take us back to Newcastle, wagons hitched up, off we go, me, my mate and the driver in the cab, Just as we came to join the M62 as we passed under a bridge, the whole tow truck stopped dead ( i thought we had hit a girder in the road) cab shot up in the air we all hit the cab roof 2 heads through plastic lockers, radio flying, hurt backs necks, cloud of dust Bang!. S*** our wagons come off and hit us, no the jib on the tow truck had hit the 1st bridge lucky for us it was right on a 90 degree turn off a round about onto the M62 not on the motorway where we would have been doing 50+    Another was on the A38 heading heading north, night time again at 3 in the morning this time a 7.5 ton Iveco van, still don't know what it was, a large dog (I called it my little pony at the time it was that big) eating something off the road, blew horn, braked, Bang. Well this dog took out the radiator from underneath the engine, the front bumper came off, head lights, dumped all the coolant water a huge cloud of steam.  The police came went back to see what we hit no sign of it. Well if a dog can do that to a very large van on a bike you have no chance of surviving.