I saw a deer in the city on Friday, what's the most unexpected thing you've seen on your commute?

Not on a commute, but when I did the Dunwich Dynamo last year I was cycling through some godforsaken village at 3 in the morning and saw a guy out wearing nothing but speedos and swimming goggles walking his dogs!

Saw another commuting cyclist once...
Seriously though, some of these are leaving me in stitches

Most unexpected thing?

A dog, on a lead!

Most surprising thing I saw was one morning an Owl disembowelling a rat on a gravestone (I used to commute through a cemetery). The owl was then attacked by two crows and I stopped to watch the ensuing aerial fight as bits of rat flew about the place, the Owl eventually got away with its breakfast.

Not quite on my commute (stupid home office!!!) but local enough to me all the same: dim-witted low-flying buzzards who like to cross roads at car-windscreen height or cyclist-head height. Not fun in situations where the close proximity of the cyclist's head to the windscreen of a car was a worry even before the sudden and unforseen arrival of the buzzard.

There are also lots of dim-witted bunny rabbits who live on the unloved and waste ground and in the fields around the local sewage works, the city compost heap and the municipal incinerator. That's a fairly deserted area at night, and the rabbits haven't learned yet that they have a shiny new five-star cycleway traversing their salubrious accomodation. I've had two of them hop onto it from one direction right at the precise moment when another one had just decided to cross - also right in front of my nost - from the other side.

I've yet to run into wild boar, although it may be just a matter of time before a herd of them run into me: I have run into the man who shoots them, and he says that there are a lot of them about and that they keep him busy (when he's not - sigh!!! - tending to stricken mountain bikers again.)

So far my encounters have mainly been with deer, hares, rabbits, hedgehogs, foxes, and toads. And men with chainsaws, and Nordic walkers (or, at the right time of year, actual Nordic skiers), and the usual doggy-horsey people and biker gangs on beer tours. At night, I sometimes also meet the kindhearted people who help toads across the road (toads attempting to cross have to hop along a fence until they fall into a bucket, and them twice a day somebody comes and carries the bucket across the road.)

Malevolent inanimate objects: mainly apples. I don't like suddenly hitting a large, hard apple (or being hit by a falling one) when cornering downhill at dusk. But sometimes also falling rocks.

The animal encounters that stick in my mind the most are the point-blank ones with deer in a hurry. Especially the deer who sprang into my path and then - with it's next leap - into the canal, which was fairly wide at that point and had very big chunks of ice floating around in it. I mentioned it to somebody afterwards; she segued off into a tale of woe that involved finding an unconscious cyclist who had been taken out by a deer in the same place. The person who came upon the deer victim didn't have her own mobile to hand, so she started scrabbling around for the victim's to call for help. Upon which the victim suddenly came back to life and discovered herself alone in a lonely spot with a potentially violent stranger who has busy stealing her phone...

Saw a big fat wild rabbit (not a hare) in central Manchester a couple of months ago. It was just hopping along the pavement at about 7am. Odd.

Most morning suicidal rabbits, bats and the odd Roe deer. A duck that last year took to sitting down in the middle of the cycle path but the scariest has to be a huge badger that would charge at me in the dark. All of this takes place between Bath and the old Warmley station on the cycle path.

Bus windscreen spontaneously shattered into a million bits in front of me. Country road, no one else around, just an older double decker bus coming towards me. With no more than 50m between us the windscreen disintegrated, and the bus came to a halt just past me. Glass everywhere.

I did see not one but two deer today, sadly killed by the de facto rural motorway that is the A40.

Whilst out Sunday I saw; a dead sheep (bad lambing prob) a dead brock at side of road (bad driver prob) and loads of red faced sweaty cyclists.