What is the worth of a bird in the bush?

I was sitting in a plastic chair in the galeria at the front of the house, working on this blog, when my don passed me carrying a slingshot. He
took a rock from the gravel driveway and shot it into the bushes. I asked what he was aiming for.

"There's a bird I want to kill."

"What kind of bird?"

"Un palmero."

I wasn't sure I understood. "The national bird of the Dominican Republic? Why do you want to kill one?"

"Because they taste good."

My don here in CBT is running for office and for the right reasons. He hopes to serve for the love of his community. He is decente y educado and here he was  attempting to shoot his national bird. I couldn't help but laugh. I explained that in the US a person shooting the national bird would probably be arrested.

"¿Por qué?"

I explained that the bald eagle is "scarce," not knowing the word for endangered. He explained that there are mucho palmero in the RD and nobody worries about them. There's lots for them to eat here and so lots of them are eaten. He told me that if I brought a pair of bald eagles here in a cage, un varon y una hembra, there would be lots of them in no time.

I've never heard of anyone eating a bald eagle, except at legendary feasts where the rich and evil dine intentionally on endangered species. I don't know if this actually has ever happened. I just heard the story when I was in my early 20s and kept company with paranoid activists. Bald eagles, of course, became endangered due to environmental contamination. Toxins in the waters where they hunted accumulated in their food and thinned the shells of their eggs. They were as rare as unicorns when I was growing up. I didn't see one outside of a zoo until a few years ago when I saw one flying not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. If I'd taken a picture, I could have put it on a political flier.

DR environmental regulation and enforcement are surprisingly strong for the region - Haiti has effectively none and you can see the difference in outcome in photos taken from outer space - but it still lags behind the U.S. I am uncertain if bald eagles would thrive here but palmeros, for what they're worth, seem made of tougher stuff. I don't know if eagles taste good and am uninterested in finding out. Like most Americans, the idea raises feelings akin to sacrilege.

One of those quirky facts that stays in your mind long after high school history is that the US national bird was almost something more acceptably edible.  Benjamin Franklin suggested the common turkey as an alternative. Turkeys, too, are native to the US and bald eagles were known to scavenge and occasionally steal from other birds - in addition to soaring majestically over the waters.

I imagine an alternative alternative universe like those in bad science fiction. There, some alternative American is hunting a turkey right now, his heart full of patriotism as he pulls back the slingshot.