“KOBUS,” asked my friend, “do you know about the poison in spurwing? Can we eat this thing?” Yes, I do, I said, and you can most certainly eat it. I had given him a plump young spurwing the night before and, being confronted with the daunting task of transforming this monster of a bird into something edible, he was searching the web looking for recipes when he stumbled across the incriminating article.
The presence of cantharidin in spurwing has long been reported in various parts of Africa. It’s the same active ingredient found in Spanish flies – the aphrodisiac of old – my friend hastened to add.
Over the years the edibility (or more often the inedibility) of spur-winged geese has elicited many a lengthy debate between those who believe that spurries are totally inedible and should therefore not be hunted for
