Discard the carcass properly. If keeping variety meats, place the heart and liver in a plastic storage bag and store on ice or snow, or refrigerate as soon as possible. For identification purposes, leave either the head or a fully feathered wing. This is required by the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Hints for Field Dressing Dress the carcass as soon as possible. Remove all visible dirt, feces, feathers, and bloodshot areas.
Wipe out the cavity with individual paper towels. Prop the cavity open with a clean stick or hang the carcass to aid in air circulation. Do not pile warm birds together. If you wash the cavity with water, dry the area quickly to prevent spoilage. After cleaning the cavity, place carcasses in plastic storage bags and pack on ice or snow, or refrigerate as soon as possible.
Keep carcasses out of direct sunlight and allow for adequate air circulation. Young birds have lighter legs, softer breastbones, and flexible beaks. Older birds have darker, hard-skinned legs, brittle breast-bones, and inflexible beaks. Transporting and Processing Game Birds Keep carcasses cool during transport.
Keep them out of sunlight. Do not put birds in a vehicle's trunk while still warm. Allow for adequate air circulation. Freezing the carcass before processing may toughen the meat. During processing, frequently clean your knife between cuts to avoid contaminating the meat. Wash your knife, hands, and cutting boards often with warm, soapy water. When preparing ducks, remove the wings by cutting them off at the joints, remove the head, and pluck out the pin feathers.
Scrape off the feathers after the wax has hardened. Teal are among the best eating ducks of all. Recipe Idea for Teal: Teal in a Jar. I want to rate pheasants higher than ninth, because they are the birds I hunt the most, and I like eating them very much, but they can be a bit chewier and coarser than other upland birds. However, I have plucked and roasted hundreds of them, and hope to pluck and roast a whole bunch more.
Each mourning dove carries with it two delicious bites of steak-like breast meat. Whether you believe the necessity of shooting lots of doves to make a meal is a glitch or a feature of these birds is up to you. I no longer make poppers, which taste more like bacon to me than anything else, and detracts from the taste of pure dove goodness, and besides, I fill up on poppers too soon when what I want to do is keep eating dove. I like dove breasts seared quickly in a skillet, or skewered with onion, pepper, mushrooms, and little tomatoes and grilled briefly.
I like the breasts pounded, floured and fried, and the legs and thighs slow cooked. A fall poult or hen is worth the trouble of picking and roasting. Once wood ducks start hitting the acorns or the cornfields, they are pretty hard to beat on the table. If you want a duck for picking and roasting, the best are rice fed mallards from Arkansas or a pintails from California. If I lived closer to prime wintering ducks, I would rank mallards and pintails number one on this list. The last sharptail I shot was in South Dakota, in a sunflower field covering hundreds of acres where the birds perched in the heads of standing flowers to eat the seeds.
Basted with fat and capped with crispy skin, a pan-fried duck breast is as good as it gets. My mouth waters when I spot a flock of ducks roosting on the water. A razor-sharp knife is essential — a keen edge is safer to use and makes short work of breaking down a bird. I love the shape and length of the blade for breasting birds. It holds an edge long enough to process a limit of ducks without noticing a loss in performance.
The Browning is my go-to knife for cleaning fowl and small game — a testament to its usefulness. A similar bird and trout knife by Browning — the Browning Featherweight Classic — is new for I also use a small handheld propane torch or disposable lighter to singe hair and fine feathers off of the breast.
A small bucket with cold water for soaking bloody meat, a cutting board, and a garbage bag round out the gear list. For additional processing like clipping wingtips or cutting ribs, I add poultry shears to my bird-butchering kit. I inspect each bird before breasting. Early in the season, ducks and geese may have many pinfeathers aka blood feathers , making them difficult if not impossible to pluck cleanly. Tiny pinfeathers cling tight under the skin. To avoid tainting the flavor of the skin, you must remove these.
Late-season birds with fully formed feathers are a joy to pluck. To check if a bird has pinfeathers, pull a few handfuls of down from the breast to expose a patch of skin.
Birds with relatively few or no pinfeathers are ideal candidates for plucking. On the other hand, early-season and badly shot-up birds are best skinned.
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