Why stop at birds? The Victorian William Buckland [0] had a personal mission to eat one of every kind of animal in existence. He was also appointed Dean of Westminster and, like Charles Darwin, belonged to the Glutton Club. Mice on toast were a particular favourite, apparently.
I live in an area where there are plentiful eagles and I never heard of anyone eating one. I kayak around some islands in a nearby river where eagles nest and frequently encounter people at boat landings inquiring about eagle feathers. The laws around that stuff are pretty harsh - I always figured them to be under-cover Feds.
Sandhill cranes are omnivorous and have the nickname "ribeye of the sky." I've never tried myself as I no longer live in the US, but I've heard they are very good.
Japan’s national bird (green pheasant) is, IIRC, the only national bird that’s also a game bird. There’s not many stories or symbolism with green pheasants (as opposed to, say, cranes) and it’s mostly known in the country as food. I’ve seen it argued that it was selected because it’s delicious (though the official line seems to be their ability to recognize earthquakes)
The animals on Australia's coat of arms: Emu and Kangaroo, are both able to be eaten. The Emu is our national bird.
I don't know if they're technically game meats but I can buy them both commercially. Kangaroo meat is in most supermarkets, and Emu in speciality butchers.
When I was in Namibia and saw oryx on the menu at a restaurant, I ask them if they really ate their national animal. The waiter's response was, "oh, heck, no. These oryx are from South Africa!" Touché.
(Off-topic?) Not talking about the pheasant, but I once read that the Japanese used to eat cranes (presumably the same kind shown in JAL logo), and even offered them as delicacy to a group of Korean ambassadors, who were horrified, because cranes were considered a symbol of Confucian virtue in Korea and nobody ate them.
> Japan’s national bird (green pheasant) is, IIRC, the only national bird that’s also a game bird.
India’s national bird is the Peacock. It is a type of pheasant and was historically a game bird that was a common delicacy, especially for the rich. It is now illegal to hunt peacock in India, but people still get it in the black market.
I've been lucky enough to see White Tailed Eagles in Norway, and they too will follow boats that have fish. Although I don't think there are enough eagles for a swarm. There is a White Tailed Eagle in Poole Harbour (near to where I live on the UK sough coast), and he also only eats fish.
I'm reminded of the Ortolan Bunting, a bird prized in French cuisine and with a most unforgettable method of preparation and consumption.
They're caught with nets, force-fed with grain, drowned in Armagnac, seasoned, and then cooked in their own fat. When you eat one, you hold onto its head and place it feet-first into your mouth, all while wearing a towel or napkin on your head to "shield from God's eyes the shame of such a decadent and disgraceful act" [0].
Why single out France or foie gras? When you look at factory farms across the globe, force feeding ducks is just one of many ways we torture the animals we eat.
Because foie gras is defined as the liver of a duck or goose fattened by force feeding.
If the animal wasn’t force fed, it literally wouldn’t be foie gras.
Most other forms of animal cruelty in food production is because of industrialization. We could clean up many of those and still sell the products without so much mistreatment.
Foie gras can only be made by mistreating the animal. So it’s gonna be specifically called out.
This is a misconception, migrating birds naturally overfeed before taking their long flights [1] and a few farms actually produce natural foie gras [2]. There was also a NYT article about a farm in Spain producing natural goose foie gras by trapping migrating geese. [ref needed]
Obviously this is totally marginal compared to the size of foie gras industry.
Not french per se, but the victorians also ate "slink veal" - an unborn calf either spontaneously aborted or removed from the carcass after slaughter. Not too popular (or legal) today.
I'm not aware of any recipes that force the lobster to gorge itself before killing it? Most lobster recipes usually involve bisecting the lobster's head with a sharp knife (killing it instantly), or dunking it into boiling water (which is probably incredibly painful for the duration, but ostensibly kills it within 10 seconds or so).
I recall reading about this in “The Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine”. In it. Steven Rinella creates a feast from Escoffier’s classic book. Excellent read.
from Wikipedia - "Carolina parakeets were probably poisonous – Audubon noted that cats apparently died from eating them, and they are known to have eaten the toxic seeds of cockleburs."
Interesting that this apparently didn't stop him from eating one.
I think toxins distribute in various areas with different amounts in the body. Eating the flesh should have less than some organs I guess. Cats probably eat everything and they are quite small.
My partner works in conservation and goes to a lot of wildlife conferences. One of her favourite ice-breaker questions is "have you ever eaten your study animal?"
We did some pest control on the farm this year and thinned out the pigeon population. A delicious bird, tasted like steak. I understand why they remain a delicacy in France and Vietnam.
A shame that some of these less delectable birds are still extinct.
Unlikely; breeding pigeons for meat in Europe goes back to, at least, the Romans, so the French likely got it from them if they weren’t previously doing it.
We live near some bridges that attract pigeons. We have purposely built roost areas and leave grain out to bring them in to shoot. Not sure it's super legal to do that though.
> When they feed on grasshoppers and strawberries, Upland Sandpipers are “truly delicious.”
In our era where foodies exist and some number of them have effectively no spending limit, I wonder if any business raises sandpipers for use in a truly rare dining experience.
This is the plot of "The Freshman", which is an excellent movie. Starring Matthew Broderick, and featuring Marlon Brando parodying himself in The Godfather!
The National Audubon Society (founded 1905) is about c̶o̶n̶v̶e̶r̶s̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ (accursed auto incorrect) conservation of birds. (thank you!)
John James Audubon (1785 - 1851) was a very different person. He was a naturalist, painter, and studied ornithology... and his ethics were from that age.
> Audubon developed his own methods for drawing birds. First, he killed them using fine shot. He then used wires to prop them into a natural position, unlike the common method of many ornithologists, who prepared and stuffed the specimens into a rigid pose. When working on a major specimen like an eagle, he would spend up to four 15-hour days, preparing, studying, and drawing it.
I recall a story with an eagle where he was trying to asphyxiate it with smoke (so that he wouldn't damage it) - the means and the time it took to do that would be considered by today's standards to be quite cruel.
Naturally the conversation turns to the Persian poem, The Conference of the Birds (or Speech of the Birds), where the birds of the world gather and travel in search of the legendary Simorgh, the sovereign of birds.
Old fashioned conservation (Teddy Roosevelt etc.) was often Human centered, We should see nice animals/places, general ecosystem health etc.
Roosevelt believed that the laissez-faire approach of the U.S. Government was
too wasteful and inefficient
While Muir wanted nature preserved for its own sake, Roosevelt subscribed to
Pinchot's formulation, "to make the forest produce the largest amount of
whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for
generation after generation of men and trees.
-Wikipedia conservation movement
I get the feeling that todays version is more "ethical" in nature, saving animals for their own sake etc.
> hunters drive quite a bit of conservation efforts
Hunters are generally exquisitely knowlegeable about the local flora and fauna. That sort of knowledge rarely accumulates without an element of respect. Some of the most effective conservation efforts in the world arose from environmentalists and hunters allying against developers and ranchers. (And by extension, some of the biggest conservation losses from the latter driving a wedge between the former.)
Whilst hunting might involve the killing & taking of an animal, it 100% relies on there being a healthy population to begin with.
Not to mention, hunting is actually very difficult (contrary to a lot of belief). You end up spending a phenomenal amount of time learning about animals, their habitat, and behavior. There ends up being deep admiration.
Not all hunters of course, some are dipshits. But such is true for any group of people.
| Not to mention, hunting is actually very difficult (contrary to a lot of belief).
This always bothered me. The attitude that you just walk up to some defenseless deer and shoot it and that's some unskilled cruel thing.
In reality it's hours or days in a row in a short amount of time a season is open sitting in miserable weather where hopefully the research you've done or the attempts to attract them might outweigh the fact that they can smell you from a mile away and are skittish at every sound in the world. Oh, and the practice and training you've had to do with whatever method you're using to hunt with.
Then there's the expense. Licenses, weapons, gear, time off work, you name it. I quit doing it simply because I don't have the time to invest in it as an adult.
I think the charter-type hunters are probably a statistic irrelevance in hunting in general, but unfortunately, money speaks, even when you don't want it to speak.
I'm mostly on board with you but what kind of "scouting" are you thinking of here? When I talk about scouting before a hunt, I'm talking about wandering around the countryside, looking for animals, looking for scat, etc.
There are some people that believe hunting should just be go to the woods, with your rifle or bow, and start walking around looking for deer. They are opposed to things like setting up feed piles of corn or apples, having cameras set up to find common paths for deer, etc. I suspect the latter where someone spend pre-season effort to find where they are is what's meant by scouting.
A personal note on that - I've done those things for years, seen big bucks on trail cams, bought bags of feed corn, watched them eating them on the trail cam, then gone to that spot and never seen deer in hunting season. :)
I’m curious too. Perhaps they mean getting others to do all the scouting to near guarantee a successful hunt?
I spend a ton of time in the woods reading sign and just generally being aware & learning. Ton of hours and boot leather burned, I don’t think that works for the “pay to win” crowd
One of my family members used to have a home out in a forested area, with access to a lake that had lots of fish in it. Not long after the fall of the soviet union, someone bought one of the nearby properties, and started fishing the lake with explosives. Within several years the lake had basically no fish left because of how indiscriminant the fishing method was. The family member and some of the other people who had access to the lake finally managed to drive out the dynamite-laden arsehole, but by then the damage was done. Even 20+ years later the fish population in the lake hasn't recovered.
In Audubon's time, the only way to accurately paint a bird in detail was to shoot it, examine it, then paint it. It's also why so many of his paintings are of birds in unnatural positions.
Even today, museums and universities sometimes pay for non-rare birds to be collected by shotgun. Collections are needed for certain types of comparative analysis when trying to sus out whether two birds are different species or just variety within a species.
His anecdotal observations are accurate. This entry on Canadian Geese is right on the mark based on behavior I have seen in some flocks near the St. Lawrence and Charles rivers at dusk:
Although on these occasions they move with the greatest regularity, yet when they are slowly advancing from south to north at an early period of the season, they fly much lower, alight more frequently, and are more likely to be bewildered by suddenly formed banks of for, or by passing over cities or arms of the sea where much shipping may be in sight. On such occasions great consternation prevails amoung them, they crowd together in a confused manner, wheel irregularly, and utter a constant cackling resembling the sounds from a disconcerted mob.
I was also unaware how long his writings on birds were - the entry about Canadian Geese is over 5000 words long:
Regarding TFA, there is a dark humor looking back on the behavior of eating practically every animal he studied - including owls, sandpipers, and eagles - but balked at a few species such as cormorants:
The fishermen and eggers never gather their eggs, they being unfit for being eaten by any other animals than Gulls or Jagers; but they commit great havoc among the young, which they salt for food or bait. The old birds are too shy to be killed in great numbers, otherwise their feathers, although they smell strongly of fish, might be turned to account. I have never eaten Cormorant's flesh, and intend to refrain from tasting it until nothing better can be procured.
[0] https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/26/victorian-zoologis...