I see crows and magpies on the road all the time. Vehicles coming at them at 60km/h in a curve. The bird can skip 10cm in one direction to avoid the trajectory of the vehicle. How do they manage that? You rarely see avian roadkill.
In: Biology
>You rarely see avian roadkill.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t avian roadkill. Birds are small and when they get hit they tend to go splat to the point where they’re not recognizable, and also get easily picked up and removed by larger scavengers. I live next to a major highway and the most common roadkill is probably cats, with the second most common being birds.
The same way we do, by insticts and experience. Crows and magpies are pretty smart too, so they would be able to recognize vehicle patterns better. Birds do get hit by vehicles still.
With most cars, the aerodynamics will cause the bird to miss the car even if the bird does a poor job of getting out of the way. The bird is riding air currents and those are going over or around the car.
If you ever own a car with a vertical windshield and poor aerodynamics, you will quickly realize birds are not as good as avoiding cars as it seems. A mini van I owned ages ago was like that and over the years I had several birds slam into the windshield.
They don’t. Birds are roadkill very often.
>The estimated number of birds killed on the roads in different European countries ranges from 350,000 to 27 million
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadkill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadkill)
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