Duck as a survival food?

If you get prosecuted for eating wild game in a survival situation then by definition you also got rescued, so good job, you made it.

The "Law of competing harms" comes into play here. It is against the law to shoot a bear out of season, but if the bear is about to eat you the law recognizes that your situation trumps the game laws. It does put you in the legal position of proving your case. That may be hard to do with death by starvation. "I got lost, therefore I killed a duck in the afternoon" isn't going to cut it. "After subsisting on berries and grasshoppers for a week I managed to kill a duck" is a much better position to be in legally. The duck may have saved your life and that is a legally recognizable good thing.

Mac
 
Surferbruce said:
duck fat is one of the healthiest fats you can eat.
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I watched a program where a French food writer claimed the same thing. He said consuming duck and geese fat was one of the reasons why the French are so healthy and live so long (despite them smoking so many high strength cigarettes). He also advised people to sit down to eat with friends and family, to laugh and talk, take a long time over eating a meal and to drink a bottle of wine a day. He suggested that mutton was the worst fat, then beef and then pork, game and game birds been the best for you.

Crispy duck skin is delicious!
 
I have hunted all over the midwest, from the Dakota's to southern Missouri. I am no wildlife biologist, but here are a few observations. Animals gain fat directly from the type of food source they are eating from. For example, I have eaten early season snow geese, loaded with fat, and they were shot off grain fields they were gleaning, while they migrated south. They were very mild tasting. Afew months later I have shot snow geese that were headed back north in March (under MO conservation order) and they are NASTY. No fat because they are grazing off winter wheat fields (like eating grass) and very strong taste.
I have shot rabbits off the egdes of grain fields in the fall that were loaded with fat and and squirrels also, they too were loaded with fat and very mild in taste. Same with deer.
I have taken game out of the deeper woods where acorns were the main food, and the fat of those animals has a tart and bitter taste.
Just some country boy observations....
 
ROLX51: beautiful Mandarin! that is truely a prize.

Farm-raised duck/goose, just like any farm-raised fowl will have a decidedly higher fat content than the wild counterparts. Most wild duck/goose fat is sub-cutaneous, so if calorie intake is important (as in survival) then definitely eat the skin and underlying fat content; though this would be largely variable depending on the season and relative position on the birds migration route. Otherwise, the large meaty portion of the bird - the breast meat, is dark and quite muscular, more akin to "red meat" than store-bought chicken or turkey breast.

An average canada goose in my part of the woods yields about 2.5 to 3lb of breast meat...we don't eat the rest of the bird, so I don't know. A mallard would top out around 1lb of breast meat.

As was stated, the diet of the bird surely dicates the taste of the flesh. Dabbling and perching ducks would generally have a milder taste than divers (canvasback excluded); since divers mostly eat fish and other aquatic organisms. I'd have to be awfully desperate to eat a Merganser....
 
Duck makes a wonderful meal. I hunt ducks from October through January and have done so for more than 30 years. Puddle ducks are the best tasting to me. These include mallards, widgeon, pintails and wood ducks. They usually have been eating grains and have quite a bit of fat. Most of the diver ducks are edible, but not great to eat. As other posters have noted above, they tend to exist by eating fish and aquatic organisms. They are best eaten by breasting the meat off and then marinading overnight. In a survival situation, I would be very happy to have duck to eat.
 
I like Duck and duck eggs both as a survival food, I like some good wild duck soup...but I never skin them.
 
Yorkshire Boy said:
I watched a program where a French food writer claimed the same thing. He said consuming duck and geese fat was one of the reasons why the French are so healthy and live so long (despite them smoking so many high strength cigarettes). He also advised people to sit down to eat with friends and family, to laugh and talk, take a long time over eating a meal and to drink a bottle of wine a day. He suggested that mutton was the worst fat, then beef and then pork, game and game birds been the best for you.

Crispy duck skin is delicious!
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I returned here to the U.S. in Oct. after living over in SW France for a little over a year. All I can say is he's absolutely right.
 
12345678910 said:
He was givin you hyperbole for the ha ha factor.

I can't walk in some parks without steppin in the goose crap, but be damned if I can get close enough to shoot one during open season.
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I know the feeling. I've been out on scaffolding working on the houses on the lake and had them take of in formation right at us bombing us like a flight of B-52s during arc-light. Luckily after the first time you realize they're loud enough that you get a chance to prepare for it on their future bombing runs. The painters were never happy about all of the necessary clean up before they could paint either. We got to where we could set new records on the lake sides of the houses :)
 
I dont need a survival situation to eat ducks I prefer even with wild ones to pluck and singe rather then punk them. I like the skin and the lovely fat below helps the skin flavor and texture. If cooked in duck fat and then placed in a container and covered with the fat, duck can keep for sometime even out of the fridge. The finest potato frites on on the planet are cooked in duck fat and that is how I do it. I prefer ducks all other meat, goose is good too though and goose fat is even nicer then duck fat. Goose eggs are brilliant things and far better then chicken eggs for any baked bread or biscuit. If I could convince my wife to smear herself in duck fat I would probably appreciate her more.
 
I live in Hong Kong and people like eating duck here, but goose is considered even tastier and it's a lot more expensive. There's a place by my work that specializes in roast goose. Being non-Chinese and about two feet taller than almost everyone else around, they look at me like I'm nuts when I go in there and get take-out, but when they realize I speak the local lingo and know what I'm ordering, it's grins all around. $4 gets me a decent meal: a big box of rice, barbecued pork, roast goose, some drippings and this scallion/ginger/oil compote on the side.

Roast goose is pretty darn good! People out here eat it skin and all. I usually have mine with the Cantonese style bbq'd pork, which is even better IMO. :)

I envy you guys for being able to hunt. I've never bled and gutted an animal (I've shot some small game though), but as gross as it sounds to my city ears, I'd like to try it. I think I'd appreciate my food a lot more if I knew what it involved a little better than I do now.
 
T-Dog said:
We all know that it is said that you would starve to death long term on either rabbit or squirrel but I wonder how much better something like duck is? I would tend to think that it is much fattier expecially in whole bird form but looking for extra input here. Thanks.
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By God if it has fur or feathers and I need to eat to survive it's going to do just fine - whatever it is.
 
el dub said:
To the guy that thinks hunting ducks is boring I would assume you dont hunt. Try shooting a duck out of the sky flying 50 mph with no tail wind and then tell me its boring. Oh well, I'm just prejudiced.
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No doubt. Duck hunting, at least what I have done, is fast paced and exciting. You go duck hunting around here, you are going to at least get to shoot at several. Not like deer hunting, where you are may be in the stand for days without seeing anything, or small game hunting, where you may bag out, or maybe just see a couple. As far as shooting them in a do or die situation, I'm going for them on the water. If someone knows what they are doing, duck is good grub. My favorites are duck dressing and duck gumbo with venison sausage. :thumbup:
 
jw2n said:
As a teenager I would pick them off with a .22 and would simply skin them as a way of quickly dealing with the feathers (a trick my father taught me).
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Yep. Not much more than the breast on the little ducks we get.
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In a survival situation, I'd be cooking the whole thing.
 
Bushman5 said:
i saw a guy here wrap a duck, feathers and all , in clay mud. Buried it in the coals for awhile. when it was done an hour or so later he cracked the clay open, and pulled. All the feathers stuck to the clay aas did the skin.
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ding ding ding. I don't know how many foolbirds I've cooked this way but it's unbelievably efficient and tastes good too. People make cooking birds a much bigger mess than it needs to be, feathers and guts and blood everywhere, when you can just pack the whole damn bird with about 2 inches of thick consistant clay and bake it right in coals. And on the topic of fat... in a long term survival situation living off of rabbit and fish alone will give you protein poisoning. Unless you're eating the brains and eyeballs as well, which are really the only source of fat you'll find in a rabbit, you will get incredibly sick. Duck has alot of really good healthy fat that will help prevent protein poisoning.
 
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