We grew pigeons when I was a kid. I'm good on the eat part. They are cool to have as a pet. We had white "doves" that we released at weddings they automatically know how to come back home. Apparently you can charge thousands of dollars to literally release your own pets that know how to make their way home.
I think its funny to consider that frrom the birds perspective. The doves must have been pretty annoyed to regularly be carted out to who knows where to be released over noisy crowds and then have to fly home :D
There's this vice documentary of a guy in I think Scotland of a guy who eats roadkill regularly. He says badger head is his favorite of all the meats. Lots of different textures he says. Super cool documentary.
In my country, Thailand, there was an outbreak of the "bird flu", H5N1, which, while it affected poultry a lot more than pigeons, somehow all the birds were then seen as disease vectors to be avoided (after all it's called the "bird flu"). What birds look as if they could be disease vectors the most? Pigeons. The poultry most affected by the disease (chickens) had economic incentives to have had their reputations be recovered. Probably no one was advocating for pigeons so... maybe that's why it's stuck, at least in my brain as a child at the time.
Actually pigeons carry ticks, bedbugs and other parasites other than bird flu though i agree no one advocated about pigeons. Btw Mai mee in Thai means nothing 😅
Also explosive acceleration, provided by those big, meaty breast muscles. That's why they sit there and stare at you until the last second -- they only get one chance to dodge, so they have to do it when a predator is committed to the attack.
Pigeons used to be all over the place in San Francisco 15 years ago. Now I hardly see them. Just saw a peregrine falcon eating a pigeon outside my bedroom window a few weeks ago though!
Food and how it falls into and out of taboo is fascinating. "Who would eat the abominations of the sea, the creatures that fed on the refuse of sailors in Rime of the Ancient Mariner?" Fried calamari is pretty darn good.
Just as fascinating is how what is considered "fancy" changes, my mom could tell you stories of how lobster was considered "poor man's food" in newfoundland when she was growing up.
@@Northraider123 yeah, in scarface Montana complains about having to eat octopus all the time in prison, while that stuff is considered here a luxury that is meant to be consumed with alcohol
@@Northraider123 thats actually a fine way to serve it. lobster meatballs where the shell is ground into a fine powder and acts sorta like a binder. the problem is prisons didnt give a shit and just chucked it all into a meat grinder.
Birds are reluctant to fly in the dark for obvious reasons so collecting pigeons at night was one thing I did as a younger person .. there was a nearby abandoned sugar factory which had maintenance walkways up in the rafters and huge numbers of pigeons roosted up there all I needed was a bag and a flashlight .. great fun and delicious eating
Imagine companies doing this, they pay a city for the rights to any pigeons caught in the city, then dump specific trash for the pigeons to eat and then catch and kill the pigeons.
I'm from a small farming town with a lot of old Italian immigrants and one of my dad's friends who's as old school Italian as it gets was telling me a story about how he grew up really poor and his parents were having some wealthy Italians over for dinner and his mom was making dove cacciatore. His dad didn't get any dove that morning when he went hunting but he did get a few pigeons and I believe a crow or something like that so his mom cooked it up and his exact words were "those rich Italians said it was the best dove cacciatore they've ever had"
Laura Ingalls Wilder describes how ? starlings destroyed the wheat fields of her parents (the last location they had moved too) it was a huge flock eating what they likely saw as an all you can eat buffet. her father shot at them, but to no avail. They ate the birds as roast (2 per person) and she wrote they tasted good.
Looking at his past recent videos, I was holding my breath the whole time waiting for adam to show us how he hunts and prepares pigeons in his new backyard
I grew up eating pigeon meat regularly in my home country Nepal. It is still one of the most popular meat choices there. People grow them in wooded nests, harvesting is done just before they are capable of flying. It definitely tastes amazing. They feed on grains and are very safe to consume.
Yeah and I heard someone ate city pigeons and couldn’t get pregnant because apparently the city put gave the pigeon birth control chemicals to stop the pigeon overpopulation. So don’t eat city pigeons because you don’t know what chemicals the city has been feeding them
Most urban areas have laws prohibiting hunting within the city limits. Pigeons are hard to catch if you can't hunt them. If you own property you can build a trap in the backyard (if you have one) or on the roof. Here in NYC we have people who net them on the street, then sell them to live shooting clubs in Eastern Pennsylvania. This really enrages the animal rights nutters here in the city.
@@deathdealer312 I mean city pigeons don't serve any purpose and just make a mess, they get poop everywhere and transmit disease. At least that way they're actually feeding people or doing something that isn't literally harmful for the population, not to mention the practice creates jobs and opportunities for unskilled workers.
Step 1:- catch pigeons at the park. Step2:- a quick visit to the vet to check them all over, or maybe a farm vet. Step3:- get the healthy ones, feed them good food to empty out their stomachs of garbage. Step4:- profit.
It's a weird thing most often then not pests are just the animals we interact with the most. It's got nothing to do with anything other then their omnipresents
@@01jiratjiampoonsap80 Damn you! Now I need to go out and get some duck for lunch! I was all set to have something simple, maybe a hot dog, or some soup, but I can almost smell the duck now. I used to get "crispy duck" from Chinese restaurants, then discovered that a simple "roast duck" from an Asian market is essentially the same thing. I haven't had pigeon yet, but would happily try it. I don't know why people are so upset about the idea. Have they never seen a chicken farm? For Thanksgiving and Christmas, we don't get a turkey. Most years, I cook a duck or goose, sometimes a (domestic) pheasant or "Cornish hens". Wonderful meat.
My grandparents were immigrants from Sicily. They made a number of pigeon holes in the gable end of their attic, each hole had a nesting box behind it. We ate pigeon eggs and squabs. I was very young at the time and I can’t remember the taste or the size of the eggs. I’m imagining that it tastes a bit like duck, kinda rich dark meat maybe. It was at least 55 years ago.
As a native French speaker I might wanna point out that "pigeon" is "pigeon" in French, and "dove" is "colombe". I never knew they where the same species. Might also point out - for those who might find this interesting - that pigeon's meat is often called, at least in Québec, "pigeonneau", which can also mean "baby pigeon". It tastes delicious.
The now-extinct, related bird called "passenger pigeon" in the video was called "tourte" by French-Canadians, which we get the word "tourtière" from! Nous sommes nés trop tard pour manger une «vraie» tourtière!
@@princevesperal That's an urban legend. The word "tourte" existed in France well before we hunted passenger pigeons in America and was already used to call a kind of meat pie. The "tourtière" was the plate in which the "tourte" was cooked. Then, by a process of metonymy, the container ended up designating the content and the meal became a "tourtière".
Something else that is important to note about pigeons from an agricultural standpoint is that their poop, when they eat only the seeds that are their correct diets, is some of the best fertilizer out there and is incredibly easy to use and work with. It is round and solid but soft and when the birds are healthy not urial or white and liquid at all.
@@tissuepaper9962 Eh, I mean "among us" is quite a common phrase. My guess is that he knows what he's doing by making a script as if all the YTP's and the meme culture didn't exist and then just let the memes come naturally and let them bolster eachother on their own. No input needed from his end one way or the other.
Re: pigeons' homing ability - there was a solar storm in June and racing pigeons all over the UK and Ireland got super lost. My neighbour actually keeps racing pigeons and he lost several.
It's well established that pigeons use the earth's magnetic field for navigation. There were experiments done decades ago sticking magnets to pigeons' heads, which disoriented them on long distance flights. Also, there are areas with magnetic anomalies in the local geology that confuse pigeons - racing pigeon owners are aware of them.
I did lethal pest removal of over 30 pigeons out of 50 and I fed some to my dog but was very intrigued by the smell so I tried it.... needless to say my dog ate 10 and me and my cousins ate 20 of them 😂
@@grundgesetzart.1463 (rock) pigeons are an invasive species. they out-compete natives for food and habitat. culling them is a net positive, despite how cute they are.
During WW2, my brother raised pigeons in Cleveland, Ohio. Since all things were rationed, and pigeons (squab) have much meat. We ate many of his unwanted collection, which was quite often. We had as many ways to make it as Bubba's mother had her many ways to make shrimp !
In the UK we can sometimes get wood pigeon. I used to buy it from a farmer at my local farmers' market. Wild rabbit too. Both were shot as farm pests. Since then I have moved to a different area and I haven't found a local butcher or farmer that sells them. If you are buying rabbit or wood pigeon skinned and jointed you cannot judge the age of the creature so casseroling is a good option for cooking.
@@davidfarrell6500 Exactly, those birds are fearless they even don't move out of the car's way until the last second. I think that they have some kind of a game with each other or smth
that is the opposite of my experience once I went to eat in a park and within seconds I was swarmed by like 100 pigeons and they no joke stole some of my food out of my hands, they are fearless birds
Pigeon is literally my favorite bird meat, I first ate it in Florence, where they make these crispy ravioli filled with pigeon breast served with a balsamic vinegar sauce, just incredible
I was waiting for a name drop, "Cher Ami", or 'dear friend' in french. A homing pigeon and veteran of world war 1. His company was pinned and found themselves being shelled by friendly artillery. Cher Ami was shot by a German solider but managed to fly back despite being shot through the breast, blind in one eye and having one leg hanging only by a tendon.
If anyone has ever heard of "12 gauge" shotguns: the guns that they used to just about extinctify any commercially viable flying flock bird were super large 2 or 4 gauge shotguns. The smaller the gauge, the bigger the hole/bullet and the spread of the birdshot. They would effectively be firing "hand grenades" or "shrapnel" into the air out of cannons that a man could only use laying down or mounted. Entire flocks of birds would drop from each shot. There are a few old timers left who REMEMBER old timers from when they were young who did this long ago, but people forget these massive things existed. If you are curious, look up "The Winchester Wildfowler". I don't think I could bring myself to fire that without someone wrapping my head up in packed cotton xD
Us Egyptians eat stuffed pigeons ALL THE TIME and it’s pretty delicious tbh. Some Egyptians also eat the bones of the bird because they are so soft after being cooked, and there’s not much meat on the bird anyways
I figured these must be commonly eaten somewhere. I'd say the only reason we don't commonly eat them in the US has nothing to do with taste a d everything to do with stigma.
"I guarantee it is making some french person real excited right now" ... Yeah. I come from the southwest of france, where hunting wild pigeon is still a thing and holy moley that looks delicious. I've had pigeon since i was 5 and this one gets my seal of approval. Although here, the "traditional" way to make it is "salmi de palombe", a sort of coq-au-vin way to make it. Hey if you wanna try something new i advise it. That and the rest of the cuisine du sud-ouest. Be warned though, it is not the most diet-friendly.
Isn't the man point of coq-au-vin that you can start with an old, tough bird, and by slow, wet cooking turn it into tender meat? I'm tempted to ask what pigeon tastes like, but have found that each new meat I try is distinct, hard to describe to those who haven't had it. I *think* I can get "squab" at a local Whole Foods kind of store, so at some point I need to try it.
@@BruceS42 For what it's worth, I've eaten wild pigeon breast and it was really good. I expected it to be super tough and gamey, but it wasn't. We pan fried it in butter. It's a lot of mess if you don't know an efficient and quick way of cleaning the birds, though. We knew nothing and cleaned them like a chicken, plucking all the feathers, which takes AGES (and was totally pointless in the end).
@@boiledelephant I knew a guy who hunted ducks, and he said the breast was the only thing worth bothering with on them. No plucking, cleaning, etc., he'd just split it down the breastbone, reach in and tear (or maybe cut) out the breasts. I bet the same approach would work for pigeons, you'd just need more of them. And now I'm imagining that---catching some wild pigeons, harvesting the breast meat, pan frying them, maybe with some mushrooms.
I've eaten adult pigeons that were roosting in a rural barn. Almost all the meat is in the breast, so it makes sense to just skin that part, remove it, and feed the rest to the cats and dogs. Adult pigeon breast is a dark purple color, darker than liver, and incredibly tough. You have to either stew it very long and slow, or pressure cook it, else it's harder to eat than chewing gum. Urban pigeons don't have to fly as much to find food, so may be less tough, but considering their lifestyle I wouldn't be surprised to find that they are full of heavy metals and miscellaneous toxic stuff.
My grandmother used to tell me back in Nebraska, they used to get a gunny sack and grab some free pigeons from under bridges for dinner during the WW2. It fed a very large family during hard times and very much enjoyed.
When my Dad was growing up, pigeons would get into the barn, going for the feed stored there. He and my uncles would go bag some, and it was pigeon soup for dinner.
I come from Egypt, where pigeons are a very popular dish. It is stuffed with spices herbs and rice, then boiled and fried till crispy skin, you can probably down like 4 of these birds before feeling full. Extremely delicious and I really recommend people to try it if they visit Egypt.
When I was in my late teens, a Vermont rural kid in Boston, I mentioned to a group of friends who were hanging out near the Boston Public Library that it seemed a pity they had all these pigeons and no one eating the babies. After a bit of EWWW! went by, they asked if people really ate pigeons? Generally the young ones, I told them, they're called squabs. Some of them had heard that term. Long story short, this led to an amazing expedition across the rooftops of Boston, seeking out and -- yes -- wringing the necks of many squabs. Because of the risk of mites, we skinned them rather than plucked them, which meant we had to use wet heat and make a stew rather than roasting (which would have made them way to dry, without the subcutaneous fat). The activity was sufficiently adventurous, and the end product tasty enough, that this was repeated several times. Who says MIT students are boring? :)
@@Mothobius Pigeons breed all year, there will be plenty of squabs all year. If you eat lamb or veal those are babies. If you're eating chicken, broilers are slaughtered at 6-7 weeks old. If you don't eat meat, you should think it's bad whether or not they are babies.
The closest relative (same genus, in fact) to the extinct Passenger Pidgeon is the Band-Tailed Pidgeon. Bandtails are Western forest birds, and do get hunted. There's a project to get the essential bits of Passenger Pidgeon into a Band-tail ovum and bring back the Passenger Pidgeon... no kidding.
I've taken and cooked a few bandtails and they're good tasting but so tough that you need to stew them to get them tender. They're much prettier to look at alive than dead and have a wonderful temperament compared to stellar Jay's and crows
@@noturfather1106 I thought you were going to say Jays and Crows taste better! Were the bandtails yearlings or veterans? Stewing is only one way of tenderizing. I would guess that someone with culinary experience could fix a Bandtail up real nice. I know a few people who have hunted them, and NOT for trophies, eh?
@@deepgardening I imagine they were older, I don't see the squabs or can't tell them from the adults. I eat the ones I shoot and don't shoot the ones i want to keep seeing in the yard. They have a lovely purple head with pink eyelids and pink breast and neck feathers. They're all over the central oregon coast in the summer.
A friend of mine driving for UPS found an abandoned fledgling crow and adopted it and named it Myra. She was quite pretty and developed a large vocabulary. Alas, he never cooked her. But tell me, how did you "take" and cook the Bandtails? People think Starlings are nasty, but a friend rescued an abandoned fledgling passerine that turned out to be a Starling, and he named her "Myra". She developed a huge vocabulary, things like "Myra's a pretty bird!" and she preferred her food served on a cookie sheet and covered with grass clippings, or dropped on the table top and covered with your hand so she could dart her beak between your fingers, spread them, and pick the food up. (a Starling's eyes can look at the end of it's beak)
I never noticed anything wrong with eating pigeons, at least those that aren't in the city eating our trash. I have always shot doves in my back yard and ate them and always thought it was weird that people saw a difference between doves and pigeons. If pigeons ever landed in my yard I would have shot and ate them all the same since they are just doves when it comes to eating them. Also dove breast wrapped in bacon is amazing.
@@apricotcotlet197 not really. Depends on where you live. In more polluted regions (like heavy industry centers, developing countries or simply cities in which people let the garbage pile up) pigeons carry lots of parasites and diseases (in Central Europe for instance). However in cleaner areas they're fine and quite tasty.
My father used to have pet pigeons and would frequently play with them... they would go out back in the environment... the come back home with a spouse if they were single. It's also a delicacy/common food depending on the localities
I remember watching this old MTV special it followed an average western teen and an average teen in northern Africa. The northern African teen was an Arabian kid, in one part of the episode he went to a small pigeon coop and took out a pigeon and prepared it for a meal for his family. This show aired around 2004 I think, I hope good things turned out good for that guy.
They are so meek and trusting and social, they are very easy to tame and teach. I worked at a beach amusement park, and I regularly went to interact with them. They flocked to me, and some regularly sat ON me. It amused the tourists. I have no special powers, other than a love for animals, and a habit of showing them that love. They do the rest. My daughter and I regularly caught the odd Pidgeon to cut the fiber, hair, and string that accumulates on their feet, feed the bird, and release it. It got to the point that several severely lame birds began to arrive on my worksite with a posse. I could swear they brought them to me, they rarely put up any kind of objection and held still for the cutting. Perhaps, I like to think, they knew the necessary cutting would result in being fed and released. My immediate supervisor, a true city dweller, was both horrified and amazed, and began to tell me "they brought you another one" She disliked birds as a group, but was amazed at their behavior. I would probably have gotten in trouble, but the Disney like scenes were adored by the tourists. (and I kept most of my Pidgeon whisperer duties to my lunch/break time)
Me: Let’s see what Adam is going to talk about today. Adam: Ever wonder about eating pigeons? Me: I’ve thought about this nonstop for the last 10 nanoseconds. Please educate me
My grandfather raised pigeons for racing and for food, and I have hunted wild dove since I was a kid, so the idea that some people have that pigeons are dirty or an animal that you shouldn't eat seems strange to me. When I see pigeons in the city I have that cartoon pop up over my head where they turn into a roasted bird right before my eyes. Also I don't think city pigeons would necessarily taste bad or be more likely to be toxic due to chemical ingestion. Pigeons are actually rather dicerning eaters, they don't just peck up anything on the ground. And as far as eating old food scraps, almost every small family farm feeds food scraps to chickens and hogs on a daily basis and nobody ever thinks it makes the meat bad or dirty or something.
Humans are one who taken wild animals like Hogs, chickens, cows, sheep etc and artificially fatten them up with chemicals or even garbage. And we wonder why so many diseases in them. Remember the Mad Cow disease outbreak as turns out farmers feeding ground up cows to other cows! 🤢🤮
I live in Vancouver, and actually eat Squab pretty often. Almost all of the sit down Chinese restaurants serve it. Deep fried until well-done and crispy skinned.
This video makes me think of IRON MIKE TYSON, after hearing his harrowing story of his bully ripping the head off of his pigeon it made him the man he is today. He now has a huge collection of pigeons and participates in the pigeon shows, its honestly really sweet
An interesting thing he left out was that the squabs were tied to keep them from leaving the Dovecote. The farmer could access the back of the nesting box from inside the middle of the dovecote, open a little door and tie the baby squab inside. This way it could not leave the nest, yet the parent birds would continue to feed them. This meant a reliable supply of extra fat and juicy squabs.
@@cat-.- Most of our treatment of animals we eat is sad. Even the way we kill fish is extremely painful for the fish. The only animals I don't feel too bad about eating are the dumb ones like oysters.
@@MayTheSchwartzBeWithYou -- The purpose of life is to be at the top of the food chain... For the most part though, humans prefer animals that eat plants instead of other carnivores... As such, in a pinch, all those vegans / vegetarians are a potential food source... Unfortunately though, they tend not to have much meat on their bones... :(
Wow. Adam's videos are so informational..refreshingly different than most of YT. Being mostly pescatarian, I will likely not eat pigeon, but now Im so interested in pigeons.
We have a 10'09" bridge in Syracuse that has decapitated many a truck. Firstly, those things are bears to continue to be abused by this kind of impact and keep on ticking (or, more appropriately, to keep on truckin'). Secondly, if 10 feet is that bad, 8 foot is crazy. You can jump up to it!! My God
It is actually both it seems, although I think he might intended magnetic. Gravitational field is a thing (in the math sense) as gravitation is not constant across the earth surface, you can map the earth using that fact. A quick Google search revealed that pigeons might be using both magnetic and gravitational field.
I love pidgeons, we have mourning doves around where I live and they look so soft and sweet, and their calls are nice and gentle, exactly what you want to wake up to in the morning. Also pidgeons are so fun to draw. Half circle with another half circle layered over it, small oval on one end, big oval with two eyes, a nose, and a beak on the other. Then congrats! You've got a pidge.
Ever since I was a kid I thought that city pigeons would be easy to catch and eat, as an adult, my dad even said "pigeon eggs are delicious', and to this day I still have the thinking of "If I ever become homeless I would seek out all the underpasses, catch and eat pigeon...and I would probably not get in trouble because they're not protected under the migratory bird act. And I bet it would taste good with all the garlic mustard plants growing everywhere.
When I was homeless and without a vehicle I smuggled a pellet rifle down to the river near our town and hunted squirrel and rabbit. I spent what little money I had on canned vegetables to eat with them. Being homeless can be very fun, albeit rough. Some of my most cherished memories.
"Pigeon" isn't really the french word for dove. We pretty much differenciate doves and pigeons the same way you do. A "colombe" would be your light-coulored version of the bird, the one you find in the bible, whereas a "pigeon" would be the grey-ish/brown-ish version you find in big cities. Living in Paris, you learn to live with these guys hahaha Great video though, as always
Is this true historically as well? It is possible that that is a fairly recent distinction, as opposed to older versions of french, which may not have said distinction. I had assumed Adam was talking about early history, maybe the Medieval Era, since that's probably around when the word pigeon would have come into the English lexicon.
Actually we also use « Palombe » in the countryside to name « Pigeon ». And this time there is even less « physical » distinction between the two, like « Palombe » really is the rural equivalent to the urban « Pigeon »
Very informative video Adam! As a bird watcher with a special soft spot for pigeons/doves I enjoyed all the nice bird footage- the way they move is so lovely
Pigeons used to be a common urban food in the USA, people would keep pigeon coups as a hobby and a source of food. I can tell many anecdotes from my father and grandfather how the pigeon coup would be raided for birds and then pawned at the dinner table as cornish hens.
That's actually very sweet. When I was little I tried to catch them because I wanted a pet pigeon, probably a good thing that I was never able to catch up to them.
FINALLY someone talks about pigeons! We bred these things for food for god damn ages and now nobody wants to eat it! And then people have the gall to look at me weird when i grab pigeons in public parks and cook them on these communal park BBQs. Savages i say...
People are just not used to eat pigeon now, specially young people that live in cities. I live in the contry side and we eat pigeons that we create but it's prohibit by law to kill them in the wild or cities in my contry.
In the 90's salmon had to have articles by doctors telling people the fat in them is good and fat is not fat as there are many types of fats. This was coming off the fat free age in American consumerism.
The Wompoo Pigeon is an Australian variety. It is startlingly colourful. It has red, blue, green, violet, yellow and red feathers. Their skin is bright yellow, and the flesh is also. Its call is a soft 'wom-poo' sort of sound. Sometimes this is preceded by a strange gargling sound. Oz is blessed with quite a few different types of pigeon. There are Brown's, Flock Pigeons, Wonga's, which are almost twice the size of a common pigeon, and they are many more types also. In Egypt, large cone-shaped pigeon cotes were made for keeping pigeons. The manure was collected as the droppings fell from the nests inside the cones, and the squabs, baby pigeons, were eaten. They were the babies that were pushed out of the nest by their brothers or sisters, so they would have died anyway. Free meat!!
A friend of mine years ago drove a truck with dual bottom dump trailers. He hauled grain to and from silos. One silo owner gave us permission to shoot the pigeons that were all over the place. We had a lot of fun harvesting them and featuring them at our cook outs. I liked to keep the breasts overnight in my fridge , in a bowl of Italian salad dressing as a marinade. They are wonderful when cooked about any style!
"Squab" also means seat cushion. If you want to know when a squab is about ready to start flying and getting tough, look under their wings. When the feathers fill in there, they are gonna go. There are mad varieties of pigeons. Tumblers actually can't fly well, and flip over in the air. People who live in city apartments can grow pigeons on rooftops.
I worked a long way from my house and lived in my camper at a RV park during the work week. I was going pigeon hunting at a dairy on my weekend off. Offered to bring some back for one on my neighbors. They declined. I brought back about 30 breasts and left about 75 at the house. A few weeks later I offered them dinner. Rock dove was on the menu. They enjoyed eating the Rock dove. I gave them about 15 breasts and showed them how to cook it. I brought them a bunch more. Finally told them what it was about a year later, pigeon.
Imagine a shotgun so large that it's fired off of a bi- or tripod, usually from a small boat. Two inch bore and 12 feet long or longer, able to shoot more than a pound of lead shot at a time. That's a punt gun, a late 19th/early 20th century firearm used in commercial hunting operations. That's apparently how you hunt large amounts of duck, geese, and pigeon at a time.
Yeah, and it was so incredibly harmful to the ecosystem and bird populations that they made illegal in many states in order to make sure that the animals being hunted didn’t go extinct
Our dog caught a few pigeons, she seemed to like it. I might've been tempted myself if I wasn't worried about the pollution that got into them growing up on the street.
What about all the car fumes they possibly breath in from nesting in bridges and above roads? Their lungs must be pretty black from all the particulate matter. Even human lungs do worse than suburban lungs due to car pollution.
How are the vermin aka pigeons so gentle and social? Do you spend time with them at the Ritz and invite them on Holiday because I would never do that i would rather seem them dead.
wow man. Going out to train tracks for a "on the way to the city vibe". Your knowledge on pigeons and ability to articulate it at a high, understandle level. You deserve to blow up man this is top content on youtube
In the UK, a species of crow called rooks which nest communally in high trees (I don't know if you have them in the US), was similarly harvested as pre-fledglings. The nursery rhyme with the line "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" is believed to refer to rooks. As with pigeons (and rabbits) they can be heavily harvested without compromising sustainability.
The Eurasian blackbird isn't a corvid like crows. Corvids scavenge for rotting meat so I don't think it's safe to eat them. More likely the rhyme refers to Eurasian blackbirds which are safe to eat.
I honestly find pigeons to be so beautiful. If you're in a Walmart parking lot waiting on someone to get done with grocery shopping and you're in the car waiting, they're fascinating to watch. I actually remember one coming up to window and just STARING at me. And they are truly beautiful birds.
I live in italy and my mom used to eat them 40 years ago, it was considered even a really good meat since it tasted well. Nowadays it still can be found in butchery (even if way way more less than before) but after the 80 basically no one eat it anymore here in italy.
I mean, when I was homeless back in 09 up in springfield, MO I was living out of a storm drain and with the aide of a perfectly smoothed skipping rock I always had plenty of fat park squirrels and pigeons. And they're super affectionate birds.
Grew up in Tucson, and it wasn't uncommon for the local homeless to hunt them. It was also where I learned you can make a "hobo smoker" out of a cardboard box, clothing hangers, and two Dakota Firepits!
In 92' I went to Hong Kong, Macau, and China and ate pigeon many times. It really was fantastic. I'd order it all the time if the restaurants put it on the menu.
“Urbanized city” here in the south we hunt pigeons to eat they eat the same things as doves and dive season is the one of the tastiest hunting seasons we get
@@carvedwood1953 they are fabulous to eat, here in Southern Ontario Canada my friends and I look forward to September every year to hunt them. They are great fun to hunt as it's like shooting clays with meat prizes. My favorite way to eat them is season and stuff them with herbs to BBQ them whole and eat the breast off them like a chicken wing. Then I collect the carcass and use them to make a stock for chicken (or pigeon, if I have some meat left) noodle soup.
@@repeat_defender In most places in the United States, they are considered a nuisance species, so there's no season or bag limit. That being said, check the local laws about where you can legally hunt. In the city it's illegal for the most part.
And if you ever checked their crops and gizzards, they were almost always full of native sunflower seeds, milo, and croatan seed; they eat the same thing that dove eat, once you get outside the city center!
In the 1980s I lived in Hong Kong and I often went to a Chinese restaurant that served squab - a.k.a. pigeons. Pigeon meat is good. And when I was going to this restaurant I'd always make reservations under the name Dwight Eisenhower. No one blinked an eye. When I'd walk in the hostess would always greet me. "Nice to see you Mr. Eisenhower!"
Adam: have you ever thought about eating a pigeon (squab)? Me: I haven’t stopped thinking about trying to eat one since it was an inventory item in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. (squab on a stick)
"You don't see pigeons in trees, they don't do trees." Hey Mr. Expert, tell that to the pigeons that are currently sitting on a branch outside my window, hoping for food.
Can't wait for Adam to eventually show us the pigeons he's raised and how to cook them.
Why I season my pigeon food, not my pigeons.
Reading this as i watch. I'm disappointed he doesn't make pidgeon in the vid :(
@@TheSlavChef Damn thats smart
@@magnussvik9683 big slav brains!
@@TheSlavChef jesus fuck, that cracked me up hahaha
We grew pigeons when I was a kid. I'm good on the eat part. They are cool to have as a pet. We had white "doves" that we released at weddings they automatically know how to come back home. Apparently you can charge thousands of dollars to literally release your own pets that know how to make their way home.
Lol
That’s actually really smart
Thats what I call a lucrative business idea
I think its funny to consider that frrom the birds perspective. The doves must have been pretty annoyed to regularly be carted out to who knows where to be released over noisy crowds and then have to fly home :D
I want to get into doing the dove release.
When he starts posting roadkill recipes, he will have achieved his final form.
He'll be a real southerner.
There's this vice documentary of a guy in I think Scotland of a guy who eats roadkill regularly. He says badger head is his favorite of all the meats. Lots of different textures he says. Super cool documentary.
The meat just comes from a different place, I didn't know there were special recipes. 🤓🍻
Popular food trends in 2012: “from farm to table”
Popular food trends in 2022: *“from grille to grill”*
“Why I season my birdshot, not my food.”
In my country, Thailand, there was an outbreak of the "bird flu", H5N1, which, while it affected poultry a lot more than pigeons, somehow all the birds were then seen as disease vectors to be avoided (after all it's called the "bird flu"). What birds look as if they could be disease vectors the most? Pigeons. The poultry most affected by the disease (chickens) had economic incentives to have had their reputations be recovered. Probably no one was advocating for pigeons so... maybe that's why it's stuck, at least in my brain as a child at the time.
your english is really good if you're not a native speaker btw
@@user-ze7sj4qy6q thanks for the complement 😄
Actually pigeons carry ticks, bedbugs and other parasites other than bird flu though i agree no one advocated about pigeons. Btw Mai mee in Thai means nothing 😅
@@user-ze7sj4qy6q most of us had to learn some english for carrying on day-to-day activity.
@@Poopyduckling9999 Gaye?
"so what's your defence mechanism?"
pigeons: we just breed so much our predators can't possibly eat ALL of us
Ah yes. The Rabbit Gambit.
Also explosive acceleration, provided by those big, meaty breast muscles. That's why they sit there and stare at you until the last second -- they only get one chance to dodge, so they have to do it when a predator is committed to the attack.
Just like with humans in the cities.
Pigeons used to be all over the place in San Francisco 15 years ago. Now I hardly see them. Just saw a peregrine falcon eating a pigeon outside my bedroom window a few weeks ago though!
@@codediporpal did you get it on video?
Food and how it falls into and out of taboo is fascinating. "Who would eat the abominations of the sea, the creatures that fed on the refuse of sailors in Rime of the Ancient Mariner?"
Fried calamari is pretty darn good.
Just as fascinating is how what is considered "fancy" changes, my mom could tell you stories of how lobster was considered "poor man's food" in newfoundland when she was growing up.
Lobster was fed to prisoners, there were even a couple prison riots over lobster turning up too often on the menu
@@curtisthomas2670 and the reason they were pissed was because they served it ground up shell and all
@@Northraider123 yeah, in scarface Montana complains about having to eat octopus all the time in prison, while that stuff is considered here a luxury that is meant to be consumed with alcohol
@@Northraider123 thats actually a fine way to serve it. lobster meatballs where the shell is ground into a fine powder and acts sorta like a binder.
the problem is prisons didnt give a shit and just chucked it all into a meat grinder.
Adam's next video: "how I caught and cooked my own pigeon from down the street"
I need to know how he caught it!
Now I’m hungry for pigeon
I think its illegal to catch pigeons, but legal to eat them
Why I season my street, not my pigeon
i kept waiting for him to catch one and cook it.
Birds are reluctant to fly in the dark for obvious reasons so collecting pigeons at night was one thing I did as a younger person .. there was a nearby abandoned sugar factory which had maintenance walkways up in the rafters and huge numbers of pigeons roosted up there all I needed was a bag and a flashlight .. great fun and delicious eating
That's why I season my cities, not my pigeons.
Imagine companies doing this, they pay a city for the rights to any pigeons caught in the city, then dump specific trash for the pigeons to eat and then catch and kill the pigeons.
@@robert-janthuis9927 That actually may have an effect on their meat, brilliant.
Just stop comment this on other videos
@@hikari4483 at least 500 people disagree with you
xD
I'm from a small farming town with a lot of old Italian immigrants and one of my dad's friends who's as old school Italian as it gets was telling me a story about how he grew up really poor and his parents were having some wealthy Italians over for dinner and his mom was making dove cacciatore. His dad didn't get any dove that morning when he went hunting but he did get a few pigeons and I believe a crow or something like that so his mom cooked it up and his exact words were "those rich Italians said it was the best dove cacciatore they've ever had"
Love this story XDD Thanks for sharing :))
Lol :)
rip crow
Laura Ingalls Wilder describes how ? starlings destroyed the wheat fields of her parents (the last location they had moved too) it was a huge flock eating what they likely saw as an all you can eat buffet. her father shot at them, but to no avail. They ate the birds as roast (2 per person) and she wrote they tasted good.
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
Looking at his past recent videos, I was holding my breath the whole time waiting for adam to show us how he hunts and prepares pigeons in his new backyard
Hatching them maybe.
Why I season my bugs that my pigeons eat
That's the next video
That'll be in his next video
honestly that sounds good
I grew up eating pigeon meat regularly in my home country Nepal. It is still one of the most popular meat choices there. People grow them in wooded nests, harvesting is done just before they are capable of flying. It definitely tastes amazing. They feed on grains and are very safe to consume.
One of the reasons everyone hates nepal
@@Hiii-p5w lol nobody hates nepal
@@sumanbhandari4244 lol you're nobody n nothing🤣🤣
Nepal is good
@@pleasekillyoursef💩💩
The whole video I thought we were building an argument that it's okay to eat city pigeons. Then right at the end, "NO!" Don't eat them.
Yeah and I heard someone ate city pigeons and couldn’t get pregnant because apparently the city put gave the pigeon birth control chemicals to stop the pigeon overpopulation. So don’t eat city pigeons because you don’t know what chemicals the city has been feeding them
Most urban areas have laws prohibiting hunting within the city limits. Pigeons are hard to catch if you can't hunt them. If you own property you can build a trap in the backyard (if you have one) or on the roof. Here in NYC we have people who net them on the street, then sell them to live shooting clubs in Eastern Pennsylvania. This really enrages the animal rights nutters here in the city.
@@lokisgodhi nutters? really?
@@lokisgodhi yeah it’s totally nuts to abhor shooting animals for sport
@@deathdealer312 I mean city pigeons don't serve any purpose and just make a mess, they get poop everywhere and transmit disease. At least that way they're actually feeding people or doing something that isn't literally harmful for the population, not to mention the practice creates jobs and opportunities for unskilled workers.
Next Video:
"The Elites don't want you to know this, but the pigeons at the park are free"
“10 Tips on how to get rich quick”
Step 1:- catch pigeons at the park.
Step2:- a quick visit to the vet to check them all over, or maybe a farm vet.
Step3:- get the healthy ones, feed them good food to empty out their stomachs of garbage.
Step4:- profit.
Because "we'll own nothing and be happy."
@@areejashraf7413 That's a lot of steps. And won't make much of a profit without final step. Final step is to sell the meat as Goose meat. Lol
The pigeons in the park are also full of disease and poison
They're tasty birds, and living in the city makes us perceive them as pests while when I lived in a farm as a kid they were these cute clean birds
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
It's a weird thing most often then not pests are just the animals we interact with the most. It's got nothing to do with anything other then their omnipresents
I friggin love stewed / grilled duck with duck gravy
The gravy is practically salt
@@01jiratjiampoonsap80 Damn you! Now I need to go out and get some duck for lunch! I was all set to have something simple, maybe a hot dog, or some soup, but I can almost smell the duck now. I used to get "crispy duck" from Chinese restaurants, then discovered that a simple "roast duck" from an Asian market is essentially the same thing. I haven't had pigeon yet, but would happily try it. I don't know why people are so upset about the idea. Have they never seen a chicken farm? For Thanksgiving and Christmas, we don't get a turkey. Most years, I cook a duck or goose, sometimes a (domestic) pheasant or "Cornish hens". Wonderful meat.
My grandparents were immigrants from Sicily. They made a number of pigeon holes in the gable end of their attic, each hole had a nesting box behind it. We ate pigeon eggs and squabs. I was very young at the time and I can’t remember the taste or the size of the eggs. I’m imagining that it tastes a bit like duck, kinda rich dark meat maybe. It was at least 55 years ago.
Please any negative effect of killing white dove
@@larbi1075😂😂
@@frederickmalicki550 please y are you laughing,I won't to know.
"White doves" are usually pidgons with white feathers.
The meat is similarly dark to duck, but less "earthy".
As a native French speaker I might wanna point out that "pigeon" is "pigeon" in French, and "dove" is "colombe". I never knew they where the same species. Might also point out - for those who might find this interesting - that pigeon's meat is often called, at least in Québec, "pigeonneau", which can also mean "baby pigeon". It tastes delicious.
Not the same species, but the same genus, like wolves and coyotes.
The now-extinct, related bird called "passenger pigeon" in the video was called "tourte" by French-Canadians, which we get the word "tourtière" from! Nous sommes nés trop tard pour manger une «vraie» tourtière!
Its the old rule of english. The peasants speak english and the upper class speaks with french words. Like pig/pork or cattle/beef
@@BrainTimeOut Ironic how over time "dove" became the fancier of the two words
@@princevesperal That's an urban legend. The word "tourte" existed in France well before we hunted passenger pigeons in America and was already used to call a kind of meat pie. The "tourtière" was the plate in which the "tourte" was cooked. Then, by a process of metonymy, the container ended up designating the content and the meal became a "tourtière".
This man won't stop until he's consumed every bird.
Very Italian.
Apparently you've never watched the Wooded Beardsman channel.
Someone has to stop him
From living to non living
From his mothers chesticles to his testicles
@@NeostormXLMAXomggg how do you know everyone's heart
EXACTLY what I was about to say
the ytpers now have a voiceclip of adam saying "meaty breasts"
Also "among us"
RRAaaTss wITH WIIINNGSssss
What is a ytp
Also several iterations of "poop"
@@yeehawpartner3893 youtube poop
Something else that is important to note about pigeons from an agricultural standpoint is that their poop, when they eat only the seeds that are their correct diets, is some of the best fertilizer out there and is incredibly easy to use and work with. It is round and solid but soft and when the birds are healthy not urial or white and liquid at all.
Main takeaway from this video: Adam saying Among us for the YTPs
Don’t forget about meaty breasts
There are meaty breasts among us
He *has* to know what he's doing, right? There's no way he would have said "among us" otherwise...
@@paddyotterness do you not know what a YTP is?
@@tissuepaper9962 Eh, I mean "among us" is quite a common phrase. My guess is that he knows what he's doing by making a script as if all the YTP's and the meme culture didn't exist and then just let the memes come naturally and let them bolster eachother on their own. No input needed from his end one way or the other.
Re: pigeons' homing ability - there was a solar storm in June and racing pigeons all over the UK and Ireland got super lost. My neighbour actually keeps racing pigeons and he lost several.
Interesting...
must be using earth's magnetic field to orient themselves,
It's well established that pigeons use the earth's magnetic field for navigation. There were experiments done decades ago sticking magnets to pigeons' heads, which disoriented them on long distance flights. Also, there are areas with magnetic anomalies in the local geology that confuse pigeons - racing pigeon owners are aware of them.
Awwww D=
@@b.a.erlebacher1139 its not well established. I thought. Its just a widely accepted postulate
i'm italian and my grandma always makes some pidgeons for sundays, she is a farmer and grows em up herself, they are really good
@@paratirisis thanks man! Happy Mancini managed to win it, and the mad english are just the cherry on top ahah
@@diegostecca7319 *Mad English. I believe Scots is devouring their finest scotch rn lol.
@@littlechemie5425 Oh sorry, i confused brits and english, will fix in a second. By the way yeah, they were celebrating as hard as us italians!
@@littlechemie5425 ye we happy
Anche il nonno di mia morosa li alleva ancora, e che boni!
I did lethal pest removal of over 30 pigeons out of 50 and I fed some to my dog but was very intrigued by the smell so I tried it.... needless to say my dog ate 10 and me and my cousins ate 20 of them 😂
My invitation must’ve gotten lost in the mail.
wow. you are a good person. Hope some feral dogs take a few bites of your meat. No loss to humanity.
@@grundgesetzart.1463 (rock) pigeons are an invasive species. they out-compete natives for food and habitat. culling them is a net positive, despite how cute they are.
@@grundgesetzart.1463 oh no! The animal bred to be eaten actually got eaten!
Cry about it.
@@grundgesetzart.1463 I want you to remember that it's not normal to wish death on strangers. It's fucking weird. Go outside.
During WW2, my brother raised pigeons in Cleveland, Ohio. Since all things were rationed, and pigeons (squab) have much meat. We ate many of his unwanted collection, which was quite often. We had as many ways to make it as Bubba's mother had her many ways to make shrimp !
how old are you if i may ask
@@beanosgaming6494 Assuming the 37 in their username references 1937, I'd guess 85!
Back in your day sounds like hell.
@@beanosgaming6494 85 in July
@@jahjoeka Things were rationed is all, and took a while to get! A war was being fought from 1941 to 45 !
Adam said "among us" purely to fuel the ytp community and you cannot convince otherwise
I sincerely hope that is true.
10:10
what is ytp?
@@fredricknietzsche7316 UA-cam poop, where someone takes a bunch of clips of someone and splices them together to make them say and do funny shit.
That's sus 😳
I can't wait for the follow-up: "Why I Season My Sidewalk, NOT My Pigeon"
This is the funniest shit i've read
My favorite comment today.
FFS 😂 brilliant
Damn you killed me😂😂😂
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
In the UK we can sometimes get wood pigeon. I used to buy it from a farmer at my local farmers' market. Wild rabbit too. Both were shot as farm pests. Since then I have moved to a different area and I haven't found a local butcher or farmer that sells them.
If you are buying rabbit or wood pigeon skinned and jointed you cannot judge the age of the creature so casseroling is a good option for cooking.
"extremely social and gentle"
*takes one step in front of a pigeon*
Pigeon: *oh frick that*
Have you ever been in a large city? City pigeons don’t give a FUCK about you… they literally do not get out of your way hahahahaha
@@davidfarrell6500 Exactly, those birds are fearless they even don't move out of the car's way until the last second. I think that they have some kind of a game with each other or smth
@@senjusan6359 lmfao
I think you might be talking about some other bird. Here in New York city, Pigeons own the sidewalks. They really don't fear humans.
that is the opposite of my experience
once I went to eat in a park and within seconds I was swarmed by like 100 pigeons and they no joke stole some of my food out of my hands, they are fearless birds
Pigeon is literally my favorite bird meat, I first ate it in Florence, where they make these crispy ravioli filled with pigeon breast served with a balsamic vinegar sauce, just incredible
"Vinegar bird is on the right "
@@zackaes I wish I could give you an award
So now I am hungry !
@@xyzsame4081 same!
@@danielventre2946 man wtf
"Pigeon is litterally just the french word for doves"
frenchmen: hold my colombe
Oui
N'est ce pas
Was? Ich spreche kein Franzözisch!
the french forsake 'pijon' centuries ago but we english speakers proudly carry on the forgotten ways
Ihme perseilyä tämäkin kommenttiketju.
i love how this guy actually gets sponsors that make sense for the type of content he produces
I was waiting for a name drop, "Cher Ami", or 'dear friend' in french. A homing pigeon and veteran of world war 1. His company was pinned and found themselves being shelled by friendly artillery. Cher Ami was shot by a German solider but managed to fly back despite being shot through the breast, blind in one eye and having one leg hanging only by a tendon.
“Cher Ami” one of the best known military animal heroes. He was awarded the “Croix de Guerre” and the “Animals in War and Peace Medal of Bravery”
@@sandrastreifel6452
Best known? I've never heard of it. 😬
Never heard of him.
@@IAmGodHimself777 Well, now you have! If you're in the USA, you can see him on display in the Smithsonian in DC.
@@zxqwerxz never even been to the USA.
Pigeon: *toots on Adam's head*
Adam: So you wanna be next in my videos huh
They definitely obliterated his car before he made this
"You guys are fucked once the recipe video drops"
pigeons here say "Gu-gu GU"
10:13
I literally can’t escape it.
get out of my head get outta my head
sus ඞ
avian crewmates
Amogus
ah good, you posted this comment so that I don't have to
AMOGUS!?
If anyone has ever heard of "12 gauge" shotguns: the guns that they used to just about extinctify any commercially viable flying flock bird were super large 2 or 4 gauge shotguns. The smaller the gauge, the bigger the hole/bullet and the spread of the birdshot. They would effectively be firing "hand grenades" or "shrapnel" into the air out of cannons that a man could only use laying down or mounted. Entire flocks of birds would drop from each shot. There are a few old timers left who REMEMBER old timers from when they were young who did this long ago, but people forget these massive things existed. If you are curious, look up "The Winchester Wildfowler". I don't think I could bring myself to fire that without someone wrapping my head up in packed cotton xD
They were called "punt guns" in some areas
Us Egyptians eat stuffed pigeons ALL THE TIME and it’s pretty delicious tbh. Some Egyptians also eat the bones of the bird because they are so soft after being cooked, and there’s not much meat on the bird anyways
مفيش احلى من الحمام المحشي
Yea, the majority of the meat is on the breast. The "thighs" have some meat on it, but it's like eating a small meat lolipop.
How do they taste? Like chicken?
@@kendlerkendler2667 Not really, it has a distinct taste that I would compare more to ducks or quails.
I figured these must be commonly eaten somewhere. I'd say the only reason we don't commonly eat them in the US has nothing to do with taste a d everything to do with stigma.
"I guarantee it is making some french person real excited right now"
... Yeah. I come from the southwest of france, where hunting wild pigeon is still a thing and holy moley that looks delicious. I've had pigeon since i was 5 and this one gets my seal of approval. Although here, the "traditional" way to make it is "salmi de palombe", a sort of coq-au-vin way to make it. Hey if you wanna try something new i advise it. That and the rest of the cuisine du sud-ouest. Be warned though, it is not the most diet-friendly.
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
Isn't the man point of coq-au-vin that you can start with an old, tough bird, and by slow, wet cooking turn it into tender meat? I'm tempted to ask what pigeon tastes like, but have found that each new meat I try is distinct, hard to describe to those who haven't had it. I *think* I can get "squab" at a local Whole Foods kind of store, so at some point I need to try it.
@@BruceS42 For what it's worth, I've eaten wild pigeon breast and it was really good. I expected it to be super tough and gamey, but it wasn't. We pan fried it in butter. It's a lot of mess if you don't know an efficient and quick way of cleaning the birds, though. We knew nothing and cleaned them like a chicken, plucking all the feathers, which takes AGES (and was totally pointless in the end).
@@boiledelephant I knew a guy who hunted ducks, and he said the breast was the only thing worth bothering with on them. No plucking, cleaning, etc., he'd just split it down the breastbone, reach in and tear (or maybe cut) out the breasts. I bet the same approach would work for pigeons, you'd just need more of them. And now I'm imagining that---catching some wild pigeons, harvesting the breast meat, pan frying them, maybe with some mushrooms.
I've eaten adult pigeons that were roosting in a rural barn. Almost all the meat is in the breast, so it makes sense to just skin that part, remove it, and feed the rest to the cats and dogs. Adult pigeon breast is a dark purple color, darker than liver, and incredibly tough. You have to either stew it very long and slow, or pressure cook it, else it's harder to eat than chewing gum. Urban pigeons don't have to fly as much to find food, so may be less tough, but considering their lifestyle I wouldn't be surprised to find that they are full of heavy metals and miscellaneous toxic stuff.
10:04 I love how that pigeon had to stop and turn their arse to poop down to the street. It's like they want to poop on someone.
I guess it's more "Hey, I walk there everyday, better not poop here" XD
It's probably more like, "hey, I sleep here, better not shit where I sleep"
Warning: they have perfect aim
Why would it poop on the ledge it is walking on? Of course it is going to poop on the ground
@@holokyttaja5476 guys, it's a joke...
My grandmother used to tell me back in Nebraska, they used to get a gunny sack and grab some free pigeons from under bridges for dinner during the WW2. It fed a very large family during hard times and very much enjoyed.
When my Dad was growing up, pigeons would get into the barn, going for the feed stored there. He and my uncles would go bag some, and it was pigeon soup for dinner.
"An eye for an eye, fodder for fodder."
:))
I come from Egypt, where pigeons are a very popular dish.
It is stuffed with spices herbs and rice, then boiled and fried till crispy skin, you can probably down like 4 of these birds before feeling full.
Extremely delicious and I really recommend people to try it if they visit Egypt.
When I was in my late teens, a Vermont rural kid in Boston, I mentioned to a group of friends who were hanging out near the Boston Public Library that it seemed a pity they had all these pigeons and no one eating the babies. After a bit of EWWW! went by, they asked if people really ate pigeons?
Generally the young ones, I told them, they're called squabs.
Some of them had heard that term.
Long story short, this led to an amazing expedition across the rooftops of Boston, seeking out and -- yes -- wringing the necks of many squabs. Because of the risk of mites, we skinned them rather than plucked them, which meant we had to use wet heat and make a stew rather than roasting (which would have made them way to dry, without the subcutaneous fat).
The activity was sufficiently adventurous, and the end product tasty enough, that this was repeated several times.
Who says MIT students are boring? :)
Red meat like a Dinosaur!!!!
Why did you kill the babies? Could of let them live a little first.
@@Mothobius It's discussed in the video. They're both tastier and much easier to catch before they've started to fly.
@@TJStellmach yea but that's like taking the babies from a mother. In deer hunting you wouldn't shoot a mother with a baby.
@@Mothobius Pigeons breed all year, there will be plenty of squabs all year. If you eat lamb or veal those are babies. If you're eating chicken, broilers are slaughtered at 6-7 weeks old.
If you don't eat meat, you should think it's bad whether or not they are babies.
The closest relative (same genus, in fact) to the extinct Passenger Pidgeon is the Band-Tailed Pidgeon. Bandtails are Western forest birds, and do get hunted. There's a project to get the essential bits of Passenger Pidgeon into a Band-tail ovum and bring back the Passenger Pidgeon... no kidding.
I've taken and cooked a few bandtails and they're good tasting but so tough that you need to stew them to get them tender. They're much prettier to look at alive than dead and have a wonderful temperament compared to stellar Jay's and crows
@@noturfather1106 I thought you were going to say Jays and Crows taste better! Were the bandtails yearlings or veterans? Stewing is only one way of tenderizing. I would guess that someone with culinary experience could fix a Bandtail up real nice. I know a few people who have hunted them, and NOT for trophies, eh?
@@deepgardening I imagine they were older, I don't see the squabs or can't tell them from the adults. I eat the ones I shoot and don't shoot the ones i want to keep seeing in the yard. They have a lovely purple head with pink eyelids and pink breast and neck feathers. They're all over the central oregon coast in the summer.
A friend of mine driving for UPS found an abandoned fledgling crow and adopted it and named it Myra. She was quite pretty and developed a large vocabulary. Alas, he never cooked her. But tell me, how did you "take" and cook the Bandtails? People think Starlings are nasty, but a friend rescued an abandoned fledgling passerine that turned out to be a Starling, and he named her "Myra". She developed a huge vocabulary, things like "Myra's a pretty bird!" and she preferred her food served on a cookie sheet and covered with grass clippings, or dropped on the table top and covered with your hand so she could dart her beak between your fingers, spread them, and pick the food up. (a Starling's eyes can look at the end of it's beak)
“To harvest a squab, all you do is pick it up..” idk why but that sentence killed me 😂
I'm just glad to finally learn what "squab" is after a Home Improvement episode where Wilson's niece prepares it for the Taylors, lol.
@@nahor88 It's also the upholsterer's technical term for the padded backrest part of an armchair.
I appreciated his little demonstration too
Not positive but I think it's because Squab is young pigeon, I was taught Squab was 6 weeks or less.
The worst thing about squab is that they are so freakin' ugly (that they're cute), it 's hard to imagine eating it. The French will eat anything! LOL
I never noticed anything wrong with eating pigeons, at least those that aren't in the city eating our trash. I have always shot doves in my back yard and ate them and always thought it was weird that people saw a difference between doves and pigeons. If pigeons ever landed in my yard I would have shot and ate them all the same since they are just doves when it comes to eating them. Also dove breast wrapped in bacon is amazing.
Urban pidgeons are just as safe as the ones in your back yard.
@@apricotcotlet197 not really. Depends on where you live. In more polluted regions (like heavy industry centers, developing countries or simply cities in which people let the garbage pile up) pigeons carry lots of parasites and diseases (in Central Europe for instance). However in cleaner areas they're fine and quite tasty.
Needs bacon because it is so lean.
Doves are also nice pets. My mum used to have one
My father used to have pet pigeons and would frequently play with them... they would go out back in the environment... the come back home with a spouse if they were single. It's also a delicacy/common food depending on the localities
Imagine being a pigeon, and hearing a random guy talking about your ancestors, and how good you taste. Damnnn.
Harold: Aye Jim you hear that guy? I have no idea what he's talkin bout
Jim: He is talking about how we are very tasty
Or just chilling in the park and some random guy pushing a baby stroller picks you up and snaps your neck
I remember watching this old MTV special it followed an average western teen and an average teen in northern Africa. The northern African teen was an Arabian kid, in one part of the episode he went to a small pigeon coop and took out a pigeon and prepared it for a meal for his family. This show aired around 2004 I think, I hope good things turned out good for that guy.
Adam: "Pigeons are tasty birds."
Timmie: "And i took that personally."
The pigeons are gone, just like his dad
Didnt expect a reference here
Timmie is back with ruin guard power
I personally make sure my Geo-Milf exterminates his pigeons every time I'm in town
adam is ganyu confirmed?!
This would have had perfect timing at the start of the pandemic. Imagine if folks were hunting pigeon from their porches instead of baking sourdough 🤔
No
@@TheTheoser I kid, but it would have fit in with the whole subsistence and survivalist theme.
eurgh...but it feels like it could happen. i can almost imagine people documenting it to post on tiktok as part of a trend.
@@dianaanonymous5794 That's exactly the joke lol
+
This got that Uncle Ben “You can take ducks from the park, I have over 392 ducks” energy
Lol? What is that from XD
it's alex jones
@@cameronbartlett856 Look up The Urban Rescue Ranch
Huh? Which Spiderman issue does he say that?
They are so meek and trusting and social, they are very easy to tame and teach. I worked at a beach amusement park, and I regularly went to interact with them. They flocked to me, and some regularly sat ON me. It amused the tourists. I have no special powers, other than a love for animals, and a habit of showing them that love. They do the rest. My daughter and I regularly caught the odd Pidgeon to cut the fiber, hair, and string that accumulates on their feet, feed the bird, and release it. It got to the point that several severely lame birds began to arrive on my worksite with a posse. I could swear they brought them to me, they rarely put up any kind of objection and held still for the cutting. Perhaps, I like to think, they knew the necessary cutting would result in being fed and released. My immediate supervisor, a true city dweller, was both horrified and amazed, and began to tell me "they brought you another one" She disliked birds as a group, but was amazed at their behavior. I would probably have gotten in trouble, but the Disney like scenes were adored by the tourists. (and I kept most of my Pidgeon whisperer duties to my lunch/break time)
Nice
I think the pigeons knew you would clean up their little feet. It wasn't for the food. It was for the spa day.
Me: Let’s see what Adam is going to talk about today.
Adam: Ever wonder about eating pigeons?
Me: I’ve thought about this nonstop for the last 10 nanoseconds. Please educate me
😀 Honestly I was thinking about this a few hours ago. 🙂
I capture pigeons for fun
@@shinyramen Illegal
@@shinyramen Illegal
When you are defending Stalingrad, you start eating anything.
My neighbor in Syria used to hunt and eat pigeons and I miss him he was a very nice man, he's ok btw
What happened to him?
Hope he’s ok. Seems like a nice man according to you
@@FaithFacts as I said, he's ok he lives in a safe place
@@imbi9580 he is! He was a friend of my dad and me and my friend would sometimes go there with my dad hehe
@@Kiyouq How is he nice? Wouldnt he shoot you?
My grandfather raised pigeons for racing and for food, and I have hunted wild dove since I was a kid, so the idea that some people have that pigeons are dirty or an animal that you shouldn't eat seems strange to me. When I see pigeons in the city I have that cartoon pop up over my head where they turn into a roasted bird right before my eyes.
Also I don't think city pigeons would necessarily taste bad or be more likely to be toxic due to chemical ingestion. Pigeons are actually rather dicerning eaters, they don't just peck up anything on the ground. And as far as eating old food scraps, almost every small family farm feeds food scraps to chickens and hogs on a daily basis and nobody ever thinks it makes the meat bad or dirty or something.
Humans are one who taken wild animals like Hogs, chickens, cows, sheep etc and artificially fatten them up with chemicals or even garbage. And we wonder why so many diseases in them. Remember the Mad Cow disease outbreak as turns out farmers feeding ground up cows to other cows! 🤢🤮
I live in Vancouver, and actually eat Squab pretty often. Almost all of the sit down Chinese restaurants serve it. Deep fried until well-done and crispy skinned.
They also eat dogs
I always thought it was funny that people were calling pigeons nasty and unsafe to eat but still ate chicken.
This video makes me think of IRON MIKE TYSON, after hearing his harrowing story of his bully ripping the head off of his pigeon it made him the man he is today. He now has a huge collection of pigeons and participates in the pigeon shows, its honestly really sweet
@My Dixie Wrecked
My father in law races pigeons. I never knew how fancy and expensive some of these pigeons can be
Cool, when he is going to cook them?
@Kovie Brion Marinay from what I been told mike pretty much the guy to a pulp
@@sophiacristina he raised them as pets not food
RIP Norm Macdonald
An interesting thing he left out was that the squabs were tied to keep them from leaving the Dovecote. The farmer could access the back of the nesting box from inside the middle of the dovecote, open a little door and tie the baby squab inside. This way it could not leave the nest, yet the parent birds would continue to feed them. This meant a reliable supply of extra fat and juicy squabs.
That's fucking sad.
@@MayTheSchwartzBeWithYou not more sad than manually induced fatty liver on a poor goose
@@cat-.- Most of our treatment of animals we eat is sad. Even the way we kill fish is extremely painful for the fish. The only animals I don't feel too bad about eating are the dumb ones like oysters.
@@MayTheSchwartzBeWithYou -- The purpose of life is to be at the top of the food chain... For the most part though, humans prefer animals that eat plants instead of other carnivores... As such, in a pinch, all those vegans / vegetarians are a potential food source... Unfortunately though, they tend not to have much meat on their bones... :(
@@seanseoltoir Sociopath. Get help.
Wow. Adam's videos are so informational..refreshingly different than most of YT. Being mostly pescatarian, I will likely not eat pigeon, but now Im so interested in pigeons.
My first thoughts: "Is that the legendary 11'8" Bridge? No... :("
Nope that bridge you are thinking of is in a different state Durham, north Carolina
You mean the can opener bridge?? Legend
Scalping trucks truly is great entertainment
We have a 10'09" bridge in Syracuse that has decapitated many a truck. Firstly, those things are bears to continue to be abused by this kind of impact and keep on ticking (or, more appropriately, to keep on truckin'). Secondly, if 10 feet is that bad, 8 foot is crazy. You can jump up to it!! My God
I also thought that lmao
10:12 I used to think my life was a tragedy, but now I realize it's a comedy.
There are more pigeons WHERE you say?
amogus
when the pigeon is SUS
I also timestamped that. Real SUSSY ain't it.
I knew that there was a comment like this lmfao, as soon as I heard pigeons among us I scrolled to the comments
Nerdy correction: I think you meant magnetic field instead of gravitational field. For the rest great video
Yah I was thinking this too
ohhh good point, did not catch that.
Maiby he talked about the big one
It is actually both it seems, although I think he might intended magnetic. Gravitational field is a thing (in the math sense) as gravitation is not constant across the earth surface, you can map the earth using that fact. A quick Google search revealed that pigeons might be using both magnetic and gravitational field.
@@lobachevscki Nice! Hey, I came to the comments to say what Jeroen said but instead TIL. Danke
I love pidgeons, we have mourning doves around where I live and they look so soft and sweet, and their calls are nice and gentle, exactly what you want to wake up to in the morning.
Also pidgeons are so fun to draw. Half circle with another half circle layered over it, small oval on one end, big oval with two eyes, a nose, and a beak on the other. Then congrats! You've got a pidge.
Ever since I was a kid I thought that city pigeons would be easy to catch and eat, as an adult, my dad even said "pigeon eggs are delicious', and to this day I still have the thinking of "If I ever become homeless I would seek out all the underpasses, catch and eat pigeon...and I would probably not get in trouble because they're not protected under the migratory bird act. And I bet it would taste good with all the garlic mustard plants growing everywhere.
When I was homeless and without a vehicle I smuggled a pellet rifle down to the river near our town and hunted squirrel and rabbit. I spent what little money I had on canned vegetables to eat with them. Being homeless can be very fun, albeit rough. Some of my most cherished memories.
"Pigeon" isn't really the french word for dove. We pretty much differenciate doves and pigeons the same way you do. A "colombe" would be your light-coulored version of the bird, the one you find in the bible, whereas a "pigeon" would be the grey-ish/brown-ish version you find in big cities. Living in Paris, you learn to live with these guys hahaha
Great video though, as always
Is this true historically as well? It is possible that that is a fairly recent distinction, as opposed to older versions of french, which may not have said distinction.
I had assumed Adam was talking about early history, maybe the Medieval Era, since that's probably around when the word pigeon would have come into the English lexicon.
Pigeons are doves, period - y'all stop being racist
Actually we also use « Palombe » in the countryside to name « Pigeon ». And this time there is even less « physical » distinction between the two, like « Palombe » really is the rural equivalent to the urban « Pigeon »
Very informative video Adam! As a bird watcher with a special soft spot for pigeons/doves I enjoyed all the nice bird footage- the way they move is so lovely
Pigeons used to be a common urban food in the USA, people would keep pigeon coups as a hobby and a source of food. I can tell many anecdotes from my father and grandfather how the pigeon coup would be raided for birds and then pawned at the dinner table as cornish hens.
When I was a little kid, I thought pigeons’ tail feathers were really pretty so I called them “angel birds”
That's actually very sweet. When I was little I tried to catch them because I wanted a pet pigeon, probably a good thing that I was never able to catch up to them.
FINALLY someone talks about pigeons! We bred these things for food for god damn ages and now nobody wants to eat it! And then people have the gall to look at me weird when i grab pigeons in public parks and cook them on these communal park BBQs. Savages i say...
People are just not used to eat pigeon now, specially young people that live in cities. I live in the contry side and we eat pigeons that we create but it's prohibit by law to kill them in the wild or cities in my contry.
In Indonesia we usually bred them to race and there are some that are bred to be eaten
You don’t know where it’s been. It could have eaten rat poison for all you know.
@@circa134 we rarely poison rat here cause we got stray cats, and it's usually fed with corn kernel.
Sorry for the bad english.
In the 90's salmon had to have articles by doctors telling people the fat in them is good and fat is not fat as there are many types of fats. This was coming off the fat free age in American consumerism.
"They couldn't possibly eat ALL of us!"
Humans: "And I took that personally."
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tell that to the passenger pigeons
you know you're going to eat an animal when you call it by its French name:
pig -> pork, cow -> beef, dove -> pigeon
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
@@TrueFork That's mainly true and I find this so interessting. Do you know why ?
The Wompoo Pigeon is an Australian variety. It is startlingly colourful. It has red, blue, green, violet, yellow and red feathers. Their skin is bright yellow, and the flesh is also. Its call is a soft 'wom-poo' sort of sound. Sometimes this is preceded by a strange gargling sound. Oz is blessed with quite a few different types of pigeon. There are Brown's, Flock Pigeons, Wonga's, which are almost twice the size of a common pigeon, and they are many more types also. In Egypt, large cone-shaped pigeon cotes were made for keeping pigeons. The manure was collected as the droppings fell from the nests inside the cones, and the squabs, baby pigeons, were eaten. They were the babies that were pushed out of the nest by their brothers or sisters, so they would have died anyway. Free meat!!
Please any negative effect of killing white dove for ritual
In the "pigeon towers" the also collected the poop that fell on the ground and used it as fertilizer. Sort of self grown Guano.
which was actually a MAJOR source of fertilizer for ancient Egypt.
A friend of mine years ago drove a truck with dual bottom dump trailers.
He hauled grain to and from silos.
One silo owner gave us permission to shoot the pigeons that were all over the place.
We had a lot of fun harvesting them and featuring them at our cook outs.
I liked to keep the breasts overnight in my fridge , in a bowl of Italian salad dressing as a marinade.
They are wonderful when cooked about any style!
"Squab" also means seat cushion.
If you want to know when a squab is about ready to start flying and getting tough, look under their wings. When the feathers fill in there, they are gonna go.
There are mad varieties of pigeons. Tumblers actually can't fly well, and flip over in the air. People who live in city apartments can grow pigeons on rooftops.
Clean the nest for the next batch . No need to feed or water them ,, they will find their own .
I worked a long way from my house and lived in my camper at a RV park during the work week. I was going pigeon hunting at a dairy on my weekend off. Offered to bring some back for one on my neighbors. They declined. I brought back about 30 breasts and left about 75 at the house. A few weeks later I offered them dinner. Rock dove was on the menu. They enjoyed eating the Rock dove. I gave them about 15 breasts and showed them how to cook it. I brought them a bunch more. Finally told them what it was about a year later, pigeon.
Imagine a shotgun so large that it's fired off of a bi- or tripod, usually from a small boat. Two inch bore and 12 feet long or longer, able to shoot more than a pound of lead shot at a time. That's a punt gun, a late 19th/early 20th century firearm used in commercial hunting operations. That's apparently how you hunt large amounts of duck, geese, and pigeon at a time.
Ah yes. The good Ole punt gun. For when you and your buddy Jimmy have had enough of these little fuckers shittin on everything
Market hunting before factory farming.
Yeah, and it was so incredibly harmful to the ecosystem and bird populations that they made illegal in many states in order to make sure that the animals being hunted didn’t go extinct
must have been tasty eating pigeons full of holes
@@digitalrandomart3049 No different from today when people go quail hunting. Got to take your time getting rid of all the shot/pellets.
10:13 When the columbiform is strange-looking
ding ding ding ding ding ding ding
Very suspicious character
@@ethantamales di-di-ding
i dont get it
@@Zetsuke4 it's an amogus meme.
Our dog caught a few pigeons, she seemed to like it. I might've been tempted myself if I wasn't worried about the pollution that got into them growing up on the street.
Not a lot gets into them, they eat seeds and bread and things like that, they aren't guzzling motor oil
It's probably no more dangerous than chicken tbh. They don't root around in dirt or eat high on the food chain.
What about all the car fumes they possibly breath in from nesting in bridges and above roads? Their lungs must be pretty black from all the particulate matter. Even human lungs do worse than suburban lungs due to car pollution.
@@dojokonojo I mean, generally people don't eat the organ Meats from birds, at least in the US, so you would be throwing that away anyway
As opposed to what? A chicken or turkey battery is filthy. That's why the rates of salmonella are so high. It's way dirtier.
How are the vermin aka pigeons so gentle and social? Do you spend time with them at the Ritz and invite them on Holiday because I would never do that i would rather seem them dead.
wow man. Going out to train tracks for a "on the way to the city vibe". Your knowledge on pigeons and ability to articulate it at a high, understandle level. You deserve to blow up man this is top content on youtube
10:12 NOOOOOOO
AmongUS SUS
📮📮📮📮📮📮📮📮📮
He said the thing, he said the thing!!!
In the UK, a species of crow called rooks which nest communally in high trees (I don't know if you have them in the US), was similarly harvested as pre-fledglings. The nursery rhyme with the line "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" is believed to refer to rooks. As with pigeons (and rabbits) they can be heavily harvested without compromising sustainability.
The Eurasian blackbird isn't a corvid like crows. Corvids scavenge for rotting meat so I don't think it's safe to eat them. More likely the rhyme refers to Eurasian blackbirds which are safe to eat.
I honestly find pigeons to be so beautiful. If you're in a Walmart parking lot waiting on someone to get done with grocery shopping and you're in the car waiting, they're fascinating to watch. I actually remember one coming up to window and just STARING at me. And they are truly beautiful birds.
And probably tasty too😉
@@abupinhus I have a pet dove-
@@grimmquinn2003 sounds yummy
Really loving your “food history” videos as of late, keep it up!!🤩
I live in italy and my mom used to eat them 40 years ago, it was considered even a really good meat since it tasted well. Nowadays it still can be found in butchery (even if way way more less than before) but after the 80 basically no one eat it anymore here in italy.
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
I mean, when I was homeless back in 09 up in springfield, MO I was living out of a storm drain and with the aide of a perfectly smoothed skipping rock I always had plenty of fat park squirrels and pigeons. And they're super affectionate birds.
there is an SHTF survivalist (prepper) story in there somewhere.
Storm drain? Epic! (Not necessarily for inhabiting.) I so wish there were storm drains in my country.
Grew up in Tucson, and it wasn't uncommon for the local homeless to hunt them. It was also where I learned you can make a "hobo smoker" out of a cardboard box, clothing hangers, and two Dakota Firepits!
didnt people give you food?
How did you cook them? Or did you eat them raw?
In 92' I went to Hong Kong, Macau, and China and ate pigeon many times. It really was fantastic. I'd order it all the time if the restaurants put it on the menu.
“Urbanized city” here in the south we hunt pigeons to eat they eat the same things as doves and dive season is the one of the tastiest hunting seasons we get
Older ones still taste good? I am definitely going to hunt some locally. I never thought to hunt them, or to eat them.
@@carvedwood1953 The old 1s are good for soup!
They eat the same things as doves because they are doves
@@carvedwood1953 they are fabulous to eat, here in Southern Ontario Canada my friends and I look forward to September every year to hunt them. They are great fun to hunt as it's like shooting clays with meat prizes. My favorite way to eat them is season and stuff them with herbs to BBQ them whole and eat the breast off them like a chicken wing. Then I collect the carcass and use them to make a stock for chicken (or pigeon, if I have some meat left) noodle soup.
@@Higgnation Sounds great. I think I might take the old recurve out this year and try to snag some. I don't believe we have any hunting laws on them.
I'll never look at pigeons the same again after seeing two of them trying to push one into an approaching train.
they were just helping him get his life back on track
@@walterbrunswick lol
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
hello. i think u mistaken for two fledglings chasing dad for food. thnks.
@@HerbysHanz this is the video I'm referencing ua-cam.com/video/E31c2ozNMWE/v-deo.html
We always shot pigeons whenever we could when dove hunting. Just as tasty, three times as big, and they didn't count against your limit.
very nice video
love from pigeon kingdom bd
I was curious what the laws are about hunting them out in nature or catching them in a city?
@@repeat_defender In most places in the United States, they are considered a nuisance species, so there's no season or bag limit. That being said, check the local laws about where you can legally hunt. In the city it's illegal for the most part.
And if you ever checked their crops and gizzards, they were almost always full of native sunflower seeds, milo, and croatan seed; they eat the same thing that dove eat, once you get outside the city center!
@@georgesakellaropoulos8162 thank you! sorry i just saw this reply.
In the 1980s I lived in Hong Kong and I often went to a Chinese restaurant that served squab - a.k.a. pigeons. Pigeon meat is good. And when I was going to this restaurant I'd always make reservations under the name Dwight Eisenhower. No one blinked an eye. When I'd walk in the hostess would always greet me. "Nice to see you Mr. Eisenhower!"
10:13 adam’s being sussy
Shut up
@@SteamEngine-yz6yy among us
AMOGUS
AMOGUS
AMOGUS
I am fascinated on how Adam Is finding the themes for his videos!!! So interesting to watch. Especially the Mondays.
As an owner of two pet pigeons, can confirm they are the sweetest most beautiful animals.
Love these videos, this one and the buffalo video are fascinating.
What about crows and ravens...or the crop culture impact or the Chinese swallow.
Adam: have you ever thought about eating a pigeon (squab)?
Me: I haven’t stopped thinking about trying to eat one since it was an inventory item in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. (squab on a stick)
That is a vintage take
Do it! They're not expensive, or hard to catch if it comes down to it.
"You don't see pigeons in trees, they don't do trees."
Hey Mr. Expert, tell that to the pigeons that are currently sitting on a branch outside my window, hoping for food.
They will land in trees during the day, but I think he meant they don't generally roost in them.
@@Ruizg559 Stock doves do though
@@kalten1380 So do Mourning Doves and Eurasian Ring Necks, but I think he was talking specifically about Feral Rock Doves (common Pigeons)
He's talking about they don't nest and live in trees. Of course they can land and perch in a tree.
@@dziooooo wood pigeon
"why i season my bridge not my pigeon"
Why I season my history and not my present.
@@MurcuryEntertainment Why I I ask God Why and not myself
i didnt watch your videos for a while. Ive binge watched so many. Im glad im back