Exploring Nature: Eating Birds

Many people enjoy birds and admire their colorful feathers, soaring flight and lovely songs.

They also like to eat many of them. Indeed, there is a good chance you will be eating a bird this Thanksgiving: The traditional, tasty turkey.

Some of the avian dishes are a bit odd. I am thinking of the “turducken” which is deboned chicken stuffed into a duck. And I’ll always recall the menu in Iceland which featured roasted puffins as a choice delicacy.

A tasting panel was convened in Africa back in the 1960s to compare the tastiness of some 57 types of birds. They rated the sandgrouse as best, followed closely by water dikkops and several varieties of ducks.

The least palatable birds were kingfishers, cuckoos, honey guides and wood-hoopoes.

I have a feeling vultures would also taste bad, but that may be negative profiling based on their scavenging habits.

Turkeys, chickens, quail, ducks and geese can all be quite salubrious, and I’m glad we chose the eagle as our national bird, rather than the turkey as Ben Franklin proposed. Otherwise, we might be eating our national bird on Nov. 26.