Feral Pigeon hunting

[breethwithme]

It makes me wanna go pigeon hunting again lol. I need to invest in an air rifle again.

when the people fear the government there is tyranny. when the government fears the people there is liberty. Thomas Jefferson

Edited December 25, 2013 by breethwithme

[Terry]

We used to hunt a friends silo. It would contain up to about 15 pigeons. We would throw a rock up on the barn roof and get ready. The rock would roll down, smack the silo and the noise would flush the birds out. We would unload, collect our harvest, then go back into the house and wait for the survivors to return. Then repeat.

[Doc]

Pigeons were my very first wild game that I ever hunted. I was about 11 years old when I built my first hickory longbow. I had unfletched willow arrows and actually got pretty good with the thing. So, I would go up in the hay loft of the barn and start shooting these big fat critters. It never seemed to occur to them to leave the barn and they just kept going from one end of the loft to the other, and I got as many shots as I wanted. I came up with two, cleaned them with my pocket knife and handed them to my Mother to cook. she did a little further work on cleaning them and then cooked them up like little chickens .... lol. They were pretty darn good, and I became a hunter. Really ..... that was what started my interest in hunting. I had actually gone out and got my own meal.

[greybeard]

Doc,..  when I shot and brought home my first grouse I had gutted it,but didn't know what to do with it. My mother took it, plucked it and cooked it. I haven't thought about that for years.

My parents grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx. Their image of a pigeon would have been of a dirty city pigeon(winged rat as we called those), and I doubt that my mother would have cleaned it. We never would have  thought of those "country pigeons". I guess we just thought of them as "city birds".

My mother knew how to pluck birds because they bought live chickens to eat when she was young. My father never ate a packaged chicken until he was older and had a hard time getting used to them..I just remembered that now , also.

[mike rossi]

I've even had the New York City kind.  They're okay.  Too much work for too little meat that's only so so.  If you have a barn full of them you get put together a nice meal for sure.  They're red meat.  Taste sort of like Canada goose.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/27/eating-pigeons-in-nyc-jackson-landers-hunting-invasive-species_n_1920973.html

 

Two comments:

 

A Rock Dove is a Rock Dove. Pigeon is what people who raise different breeds of rock doves call them. There is a laundry list of vernacular names for the Rock Dove: city pigeon, barn pigeon, domestic pigeon, feral pigeon, pigeon, farm pigeon, or as the DEC calls them - rock pigeons. But they all are Rock Doves or crosses between rock doves and the dovecote.

 

The HSUS publically stated that in order to further animal rights to "equality", that it is necessary to wipe out Christianity and Judism in the United States. However, one of the most potent arguments made by them against hunting mourning doves, is that this is the same bird as the Dove of Peace written about in the bible. However the mourning dove is native to north America, not the middle east. Since few people are likely to make the same leap of faith about what they call the pigeon, we as hunters interested in establishing a mourning dove hunting season should start calling rock doves just that, not pigeons. The fact that the DEC refers to them as rock pigeons is unsettling in itself.

 

My other comment is to remind you that a rock dove is only slightly smaller than a ruffed grouse, a chukar partridge, or a hen green winged teal. Nobody would ever make a statement that those birds are too small for table fare. The American woodcock, bobwhite and other quails, white winged dove, Eurasian collared dove, and the mourning dove are even smaller. The most hunted, bagged and eaten game in the USA is the mourning dove....  

Edited December 26, 2013 by mike rossi

[Elmo]

Hence why I said "If you have a barn full of them you get put together a nice meal for sure".

 

I was only able to get one.  Breasted it.  2 bites and I was done.

Edited December 26, 2013 by Elmo

[mike rossi]

I realized I made a mistake and was not clear about something I said earlier in this thread. I want to clarify that and put it in to the perspective of how it relates to establishing a mourning dove hunting season. (The OP also mentioned mourning doves in the opening post.)

 

NY State Environmental Conservation Law does allow the year-round taking of Rock Doves. However another section of NYS Environmental Conservation Law (section 11-0513) prohibits taking Antwerp or Homer pigeons which are wearing a seamless band or a ring with a registration number. (We have in the past  mistakenly referred to this as a NY state agriculture markets law, however it is in fact an NY state environmental conservation law.) This law is meant to protect people who own domestic stock. The said rings or seamless bands are not to be confused with the bands used by wildlife agencies to study and monitor birds. It is nearly impossible to see these bands on birds in flight and, (as we alluded to in the video posted to this page last week on January 12), that despite the language in 11-0513, it is not possible to distinguish the Antwerp and the Homer from the numerous varieties created by bird breeders or even from the ancestral rock dove, nor is there enough genetic difference between any of the numerous races of rock doves to designate them separate species. 

 

The only (guess) I have for why this law expressively names two particular breeds, is that perhaps those breeds are the racing breeds and the law is designed to protect the sport of racing, but not the act of allowing  birds not used for racing to roam at large, particularly the other breeds with less "homing" instinct that are more likely not to return (become feral).

 

We are not saying to break the law, we are pointing out problems with the law. Although the objective of our face book group is mourning doves, not rock doves, the confusion associated with this law does have bearing on our mourning dove objective. Discussion about this law and about rock doves on face book; is intended to educate hunters, policy makers, and the public at large, that the argument of the Humane Society of the United States, which states the mourning dove is the Dove of Peace referred to in the Bible, is erroneous.

 

 

Edited January 23, 2014 by mike rossi