Magpie Monsters!

Okay, so you may recall me mentioning that a bird hit me in the head, while I was walking through the park about 3 weeks ago. It was a bird like in the picture shown above. It's called a magpie and apparently, they can be very aggressive during nesting time. Since that dumb bird flew into me unexpectantly, my neck and headaches have been REALLY bad. So bad that I had to go see an osteopath yesterday, in hopes of getting whatever is wrong fixed. I was telling her about how my headaches have been so much worse since the bird incident and she was telling me that the magpies in her neighborhood are so aggressive that people have to walk with umbrellas, even on beautiful sunny days, to avoid being swooped at. Melinda (my osteopath) was saying that even to go to the end of her driveway to get her mail, she has to have her umbrella or they'll swoop at her like 6 times! On top of this, apparently they swoop at people on bikes the most. She says that her "flatmate" has stopped biking because the swooping was too bad, and the other day when she was biking, they kept slamming into her helmet. I googled "magpies" to find these pictures and the one with the chick on the bike was titled..."Australian magpie swooping at a cyclist." I'm going to start carrying an umbrella, especially after spending $75 yesterday to have my neck fixed! According to Melinda, it'll be another month or so before these birds chill out and stop swooping. It's interesting to me, that of all the creatures in Australia, the birds seem to be what scare me the most! Who'd a thought??