{"id":20252,"date":"2012-10-26T09:40:56","date_gmt":"2012-10-26T14:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=20252"},"modified":"2013-11-15T13:46:25","modified_gmt":"2013-11-15T19:46:25","slug":"how-one-food-blogger-caused-a-firestorm-for-parks-and-wildlife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/10\/26\/how-one-food-blogger-caused-a-firestorm-for-parks-and-wildlife\/","title":{"rendered":"How One Food Blogger Caused a Firestorm For Texas Parks and Wildlife"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo courtesy of Ryan Adams<\/p>

The dove that flew into Ryan Adams' house was both a blessing and a curse.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department<\/a> has been receiving hate mail from around the country thanks to the gastronomic adventures of an Austin-area food blogger. It all started when the man\u2019s unlikely dinner literally went bump in the night.<\/p>\n

Ryan Adams was watching Project Runway with his wife when it happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of a sudden there was this loud BAM!” Adams remembers, “And we realized it came from outside.”<\/p>\n

He walked into his backyard and saw something lying in the grass by his house.<\/p>\n

“It was very dark,” he says.\u00a0At first he thought it might be a bat.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cIt was actually laying right here next to the fig tree,” Adams says, pointing to the location of the animal’s demise. “I came over [and] picked it up. It was just a dove. It didn\u2019t have any sores, any lesions, it was perfectly fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when the thought dawned on him. Eat the bird.<\/p>\n

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Photo courtesy of Ryan Adams<\/p>

Adams' wild dove on the grill<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI had a lot of friends who are hunters and they are going out and shooting doves at the exact same time,” Adams says. “I thought, ‘Those suckers are doing the hard work, and this one just came to me.'”<\/p>\n

So Ryan looked up a recipe for grilled quail a la mancha. He cleaned it. Then grilled it. And ate it.<\/p>\n

“It was\u00a0fantastic,” he remembers.<\/p>\n

And in a crucial twist, he then blogged about it<\/a>. Adams is a prolific food blogger, with a focus on cooking (and lusciously photographing) nose-to-tail eating<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The headline for his post? ‘When Life Gives You Wild Game…’<\/a><\/p>\n

That was followed up with a post by Adams on the popular social sharing site Reddit<\/a>. “I thought this was kind of an off-the-wall thing, so it was something I wanted to share,\u201d Adams says.<\/p>\n

The Reddit post got about 2,000 hits. Then he started getting calls from a couple of reporters.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of those reporters mentioned that, by eating a found dove, Adams had actually\u00a0broken Texas law. This came as a surprise to him. \u00a0But, the thing is, it\u2019s true<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is illegal to possess wildlife resources, and the white-winged dove are a migratory game bird on the wildlife resource list,” says\u00a0Steve Lightfoot, a spokesperson for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.<\/p>\n

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Photo courtesy of Ryan Adams<\/p>

The finished product.<\/p><\/div>\n

He says Adams technically did<\/em> break the law. If a bird flies into your house and dies, you shouldn’t eat it. The law is in place for a couple reasons.<\/p>\n

“A lot of those regulations were born out the need to restrict commercial harvest,” Adams says.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the matter of people getting sick from eating diseased animals. Lightfoot recommends that Texans restrain themselves from picking up dead creatures found on the ground, not matter how appetizing they appear.<\/p>\n

“We have had incidents where we are seeing sick dove die off, so that is a concern,” he says “We don\u2019t want people or pets retaining or eating sick birds.\u201d<\/p>\n