table bird

plural table birds

1. A chicken or other poultry raised for meat (as opposed to laying eggs); a wild bird hunted for its meat.

   Coordinate term: layer

   3 more examples

   Among table birds, the partridge is so very abundant in some localities that it seems like butchery to kill them by the half dozen.

   1884, William Edwin Hamilton, Muskoka Sketch, page 36

   […] she ran chickens on quite a big scale now, and made a few pounds every month from eggs and table birds;

   1950, Doris Lessing, chapter 7, in The Grass Is Singing, published 1969, page 128

   The leader called, himself unfortunately plump as a table bird, ‘Let them listen to the crying-out of the empty guts of the workers.’

   1962, Anthony Burgess, chapter 6, in The Wanting Seed, published 1965, section 2, page 88