Probably a cardinal tastes better, being more of a seedeater, but neither bird would have any white meat. Birds that fly a lot, like ducks and songbirds, use those breast muscles for heavy flying duty, so they’re blood-enriched dark meat. Chickens are basically ground-dwelling birds that only fly up into the trees to roost at night, or when danger threatens, so their breast meat is white, like rabbits, who also don’t use their muscles much for flying.
I’m currently reading (browsing through) Escoffier’s cookbook. What that man can do with a round roast of veal and 15 larks stuffed with truffles is amazing.
Probably “agronomy” because of the tree thing. Probably “retired” because hey, that’s what people do when they retire, is take up birdwatching, right?
More years ago than I care to remember, I was also a 14-year-old birdwatcher, walking around the neighborhood with binoculars pressed to my eyes. I share your frustration at having had somebody cut down some of my best birdwatching spots.
I once had a magic spot in the Chicago suburbs where I lived that was, to all intents and purposes, a swamp. A powerful spring came up once upon a time, killed the trees that were there, made a lovely swamp, many years later farmers came and planted cornfields around the swamp. Many years after that, suburban developers came and build houses around the swamp, but could do nothing about it, so forceful was the water’s flow. Every summer they came out with bulldozers and backhoes and drained it, and every winter it filled in again. Meanwhile, I birdwatched. Yellow warblers, black-crowned night herons, once a smoky tern, just stopping by, once I saw a tiny thing that had to be a rail chick, but it disappeared into the cattails before I had a chance to look for an adult. A resident green heron. Empidonax flycatchers that I finally decided, on the basis of calls and habitat, were probably Least. Blue-winged teal and Canada geese, twice a year like clockwork. Mallards and coots, of course. And ENORMOUS goldfish, 2 or 3 feet long. You could see them through the ice in winter, while you were ice skating. Muskrats.
Finally, one summer the developer got his act together, got some truly righteous earthmoving equipment, dug a drainage ditch the size of the Suez Canal, and transformed the swamp into the totally unmagical, sterile Panfish Pond, in Glen Ellyn, at the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Park Boulevard, and you can go and look at it today if you want to break your heart.
Two of my favorite books have always been Freckles and Girl of the Limerlost by Gene Stratton Porter. Let me tell you, I IDENTIFIED with the Limberlost.
End of trip down Memory Lane. We will now resume our regularly scheduled flaming of idiots with chainsaws and backhoes.
Fuck you, Mr. Bigass Developer, wherever you are. This was before “wetlands” or your ass would have been grass and the Nature Conservancy the lawnmower.