Remember when Charlie Chaplain and his friend were starving in a cabin, and the friend started to hallucinate that Charlie Chaplain was a chicken? That can happen when you're birding, too. You forget to pack a lunch, and all of a
sudden that acorn woodpecker youre scoping starts to look like a delicious #1 special from Chicken Shack. You should resist the temptation, in that particular case, because acorn
woodpeckers taste like shit, but some birds actually taste pretty good. In some
cases, people will actually go out of
their way to eat them. That'll be the whole point of the expedition! It's not a
style of birding I know much about, but I've dabbled enough to put together this
handy guide for you. Bon apetit!
Chicken - This is
the best bird to eat, by a lot, and thousands of people agree with me. Chicken
is one of those rare things, like The Beatles, Goodfellas, and California, that
deserves its enormous popularity. But for a fat, flightless an ubiquitous bird, it's surprisingly
hard to catch--not because chickens are so nimble, but because they're all
either dead or inside some type of cage. There are about 19,000,000,000 chickens in the world, and
almost every manmade structure you see has some chicken parts inside of it (think about that next time you're high on a plane!), but unless you want to
pay money for it (which is cheating), good luck getting your hands on one. Go
out into the woods and try to find a chicken right now. See? You didn't even
try, because you know it's too hard. Every chicken you see is "spoken
for." There are free roosters on craigslist sometimes, but they aren't as
good to eat.
Turkey - Turkeys
are a popular food source, too--
Thomas alone consumes almost four tons of
turkey per year--and they're similarly dumb and defenseless, for the most part,
but there is a "
wary and magnificant" variety of turkey--the "Wild Turkey"--that can
be found out in the woods, with a little patience and know-how. (Google it.) As
discussed in episode 4 of Dial B For Birder
("Stinson Beach"), Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the Wild Turkey
the official bird of the United States, but got out-voted by the other, less
goofy founding fathers. It's a good, thing too, because otherwise turkey would
be "bad to eat," for patriotic reasons, like the bald eagle.
California Quail -
You could argue that the quail is bad to eat for patriotic reasons, if you're Californian,
but I would counter-argue that the whole point of being a Californian is doing
whatever you want, all the time. I've only eaten half a quail over the course
of my entire life, but it was really good. My friend shot it with a bb gun and
cooked it up for breakfast, and I still admire him for it.
Duck - If you
ever become a golden gate park wook, this is going to be your main source of
food. Just glue a rubber duck to your hat, submerge yourself in pond water from the hat down,
creep up as close as you can, and GRAB EM BY THE LEGS!!
Muscovey ducks are not as
tasty, but you get more meat.
BAD TO EAT:
Seagull
Raven
