My wife Eileen and I have hunted and cooked a lot of wild upland birds over the decades, many of them when we put 12,000 miles on out vehicles in 2000, when she was assigned to write her book Upland Bird Cookery by, believe it or not, Ducks Unlimited--which after a search a couple years earlier for somebody write Duck & Goose Cookery assigned it to her. It sold so well she also got the call for the upland book.
She does not use pen-raised birds for her recipes, so we did a lot of hunting--and found we both liked chukars and Hungarian partridge the best of all upland birds, because they're a combination of light and dark meat, with more flavor than all-white-meat bird, but not overwhelming like some all-dark-meat birds can be for some people, such as woodcock, sharptails, prairie chickens and sage grouse. Though all can be very good with the right field-care and cooking techniques.
Ptarmigan also rank right up there, for the same reason as chukars and Huns. Have hunted them from Alaska to Nunavut Territory to northern Quebec.....
