~Mozdoc

I had something happen this morning that was completely random and scared the absolute shit out of me. By reading the journal entry you know what it is, but how it happened might not be obvious.

My path that I take to work uses only a few roads; "10th Street East" north to "Avenue E", and then head east to "120th Street East" and then I head to Edwards Air Force Base, but the journey on Avenue E is sixteen miles through flat rural dark desert farmland on a two lane road with weeds on the shoulders and there's no streetlights and minimal houses the whole way. My biggest fear and something that you grow alert to out here is coyotes and stray ground animals that could dart out of the tumbleweeds.

Making my turn after another car, I'm at speed sixty miles per hour and settled in for my trip to work.

And then a white blur of something gets hurled directly at my window from the side of the road right at head level, impacts the side of my car with a BLAM. Freaked me right the fuck out, I never saw anything in my field of vision to anticipate it. Fully expected some kind of a dent in my door, I found a weed free area to stop I used my cell phone flashlight and looked over the side of my car. I...didn't see anything. No dents, no apparent scuffs, no glass chips. What the fuck hit me!? Or did someone launch something at my car!?

Curiosity now peaked I turned back around and wondered if I could find whatever it was.

Yep, I found it by the roadside.
It was an OWL.
A fucking white feathered owl had torpedoed itself straight into the side of my car.
No, it didn't make it. Some coyote is going to have a fine meal out of it.

How utterly god damn random that was. Had I left any earlier or later this probably wouldn't have happened. This is now the third occurrence where I've hit birds with my vehicles, but I got to say, its the first time a bird has hit me and not the other way around.

I'm still kind of wondering as to what this owl was thinking or what triggered this behavior. Is it normal for owls to just kamikaze themselves into vehicles? Was it flying at me from an angle seeing some light on the dashboard thinking it was food? Later on in the afternoon I took a closer look at my car and the impact from the owl was squarely right at the seam between the front and rear door body panels underneath the B-pillar where there's a bird shaped torpedo disturbance in the dirt now, but that seems to be about it.

--Mozdoc