Recipe for a Stuffed Wood Pigeon

A very stuffed pigeon!

Don’t worry! Poor old Woody isn’t dead and heading for the cooking pot – he’s just eaten too much and can’t fly!

Wood pigeons are very destructive birds – they eat just about everything from corn to brussels sprouts (phowaah) and like a labrador dog they don’t know when they’ve eaten enough. A couple of years ago I found half a dozen wood pigeons prostrate under an oak tree in autumn – their tummies bloated with acorns, unable to move or fly because they were literally too stuffed to move!

So what about poor old Woody? My son found him by the side of the road lying on his back, feet in the air. You can see from his crop that he’s completely stuffed with something he’s been eating. We turned him the right way around, gave him a pre-flight check – then placed him carefully in the undergrowth to recover from his meal.

A happy ending for Mr Woodpigeon…