Eating a sparrow egg
One of our resident song sparrows hasn't been
having a good year. It seems like every time she builds
a nest and fills it with eggs, I accidentally impact it
while gardening, then the mother bird abandons her offspring.
As much as we'd like
to allow her to hatch some chicks, Mark pointed out that there's
no reason to let abandoned sparrow eggs go to waste. So when
the third nest came out with some raspberry primocanes, I decided
to add the sole egg to our lunch.
I boiled the sparrow
egg up while cooking sweet corn, let the egg cool slightly, then
shelled it out and put the tiny morsel on top of our Swiss
chard. The egg was nearly entirely yolk and tasted
delicious...perhaps because of the garlic butter it soaked up.
Granted, sparrow eggs
will remain in our survival-food category despite the
flavor. After all, it would take about a dozen of them to
make one chicken egg, and who wants to negatively impact the local
song-bird population? But if I find more abandoned nests
around, I'll definitely cook up the bounty.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I know what you did was good and you were trying to not let things go to waste, but I wouldn't post that on the web. Sparrows, their nests and their eggs are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
http://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/RegulationsPolicies/treatlaw.html
Melospiza melodia is the song sparrow. They are. Here is the list. http://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/regulationspolicies/mbta/mbtandx.html#s
It is silly I know. There seems to be unlimited #s of those things, but they are protected.
I wonder if someone will tell you, with the way the law reads, its okay to 'eat the egg but not the bird' I wouldn't know, just wondering.
However, non-native birds (and a few others) are NOT protected by the treaty which has been cited above.
This means that you can eat all the eggs of English Sparrows(Passer domesticus) and Starlings. English sparrows are perhaps the most damaging bird ever imported to the US, and they should be be shot or otherwise eliminated at every opportunity. If eating their eggs appeals to you, please be my guest!