We tried eating a couple barn pigeons we shot when we were kids. They tasted about like a dove but were tough as bull whip leather.

In the old days down in PA all the pigeons from the shoots were eaten I'm sure. Poor country folks weren't going to waste that much free meat. I've heard mention of them being boiled and then made into pigeon pie or stew more than once.


DLH

I tried frying some pigeons once. As Destry said, tough. Afterward, I got to thinking that parboiling them might have made a big difference. My neighbor said as a kid (1920s), his mother would fix pigeons anytime the kids would shoot a mess from the barn.

Wood Pigeons are eaten all the time in the UK.

I wouldn't have a problem eating a pigeon long as it's a country shot bird.


DLH

I don't think there are many "Country" pigeons at our shoots. I ate a few from PA box bird shoots when I was barely a teenager, but I was not impressed. I never tried it again.

Our Springer Spaniel club kept a pigeon coop for training birds. Each spring we had to clean out the coop. Two years in a row, we took out 27 trash cans of pigeon poo. Lost my taste for eating pigeon after that

I think pigeon shooting got it's start in the days when the Passenger Pigeon was a pest. It was a wild bird that numbered in the billions and could descend on a farmers field and consume his years crop in minutes. They were killed by the millions by farmers and market hunters. They had a fatal flaw in their reproductive cycle:they mated in the air in huge swirling masses. It was a hit or miss proposition and very inefficient. As the numbers declined their reproductive rate fell and before anyone knew they were extinct.
They were sold as market birds and were reportedly very tasty.
I feel the same way about city pigeons as previously stated about rats. A Dr. Fox did a PhD study on the ecology of dogs,rats and pigeons in Baltimore in the early '70's. He found that pigeons many times lived on a diet of dog feces. Dogs ran cats off trying to kill rats. Interesting study. As I remember it was published as "The Ecology of the Feral dog" or some such.
A friend once told me a story of a pigeon shoot he went to and thought he was going to be shot himself after starting to miss shots late in the day.

Ben,

If I was you, I'd buy that book my friend wrote before making statements about passenger pigeons. They ate mast and berries mostly, they weren't a farm pest in hardly any way. They didn't mate while flying in the air either. Their only real mating problem was that they laid a single egg and didn't usually nest every year.


DLH

[QUOTE=Ben Rawls;148048]I think pigeon shooting got it's start in the days when the Passenger Pigeon was a pest. It was a wild bird that numbered in the billions and could descend on a farmers field and consume his years crop in minutes. They were killed by the millions by farmers and market hunters. They had a fatal flaw in their reproductive cycle:they mated in the air in huge swirling masses. It was a hit or miss proposition and very inefficient. As the numbers declined their reproductive rate fell and before anyone knew they were extinct.
They were sold as market birds and were reportedly very tasty.

And I think the real problem was the deforestation of their nesting grounds. Millions of acres turned to farm land.