There are hundreds of these buggers flying and shitting all over the place (mostly on my car) and I got to wondering can they be eaten?.
They’re big, fat and certainly look to have plenty of meat on their bones.
Of course.
Starter link… Google Answers: Eating Seagull
The poached seagull one is good for a laugh.
IIRC from some survival training years back, all sea birds are edible.
There was a BBC documentary the other week about this very subject. It concerned the remote Scottish island of St Kilda which was populated till the 1920’s. One of their main source of food were sea-birds which they used to collect by abseiling down the cliffs. I am pretty sure that the residents of the Faeroe Islands also eat gulls.
BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Cameras to give bird's eye view, from the page of links I listed above.
Are there any truly inedible birds? Sure, many might be unpalatable or just awkward to eat because of their size, but people pay good money to eat some really tiny ones.
I’m not sure what would constitute “inedible”, unless the flesh was actually poisonous, or its consistency made it impossible to chew/swallow.
Not an authoritative source, but I’ve read a humorous piece purporting to be a recipe for preparing cormorants, and implying that they are very unpalatable.
?
Are these flightless, brain-damaged birds that just perch around on cliffs all day waiting to be collected by slowly-descending humans ten times their size?
With the inland seagulls I would be worried about contamination both parasite and chemical because they do seem to favour hanging about on landfill sites feeding on goodness knows what. Probably much better to get some nice coastal organic seagulls if you’re gonna try them.
I’m sure even the St Kildans had heard of nets. And eggs.
Warning, in case someone is actually serious about this. You would be breaking the Migratory Bird Treaty Act by deliberately killing and eating a non-game bird (out of season, if that applies) native (i.e. not introduced) to North America.
Do they “skyfish” there, like the Icelanders do for puffin? Skyfishing for puffin (not safe for work due to animal slaughter, language and Gordon Ramsay)
Bon appetit with the gulls, though.
Crow is meant to be a bit dodgy to eat.
Stay off the albatross, or else you will spend the rest of your life stopping one of three and boring the pants off them.
I don’t know - the last residents left in 1930. According to the National Trust website about St Kilda http://www.kilda.org.uk/frame1.htm they trapped the birds “by hand, or with a fowling rod or a snare.”, so my supposition above about nets is likely wrong.
Although, in spite of the common saying about eating crow, rook pie is apparently an actual dish. You are supposed to use young rooks which have just fledged, as older ones are apparently terrible.
I tried to Google this question, but gull edible returns zero hits.
I’d stay away from the Hoatzin. “…the bird has a disagreeable, manure-like odor and is only hunted for food in times of dire need.”
(I have no idea why my brain retains such information.)
I believe sparrow pie is eaten in the Channel Islands
You’d need a hell of a lot of sparrers to make a pie big enough to satisfy me.
Yes, I’m a greedy sod. Why do you ask?