English

Alternative forms

• mutton-bird, muttonbird

Noun

mutton bird ‎(plural mutton birds)

1. (chiefly Australia, New Zealand) Any of various seabirds whose flesh is said to taste like mutton when cooked, especially Puffinus griseus, Puffinus tenuirostris, or a petrel of the genus Pterodroma.
   • 1941, Ernestine Hill, My Love Must Wait, A&R Classics 2013, p. 186:

     He dubbed them mutton-birds, for they came like lambs to the slaughter.

   • 1959, Monographiae Biologicae, Volume 8, page 422,

     Mutton Bird (Puffinus tenuirostris) Ornithosis

     Early in 1953 Dr. D. L. Serventy sent us twelve mutton birds from the Bass Strait Islands for another investigation. One of these birds died shortly after reaching Adelaide.

   • 1983, Robert Drewe, The Bodysurfers, Penguin 2009, p. 17:

     The oil he sprayed on his customers was derived from the oil glands of mutton birds hunted in the islands of the Bass Strait by the descendants of nineteenth-century sailors and the Tasmanian Aboriginal women they had kidnapped.

   • 2000, Donna Eden, David Feinstein, Brooks Garten, Caroline Myss, Energy Medicine, page 260,

     Thousands of small birds, Tasmania′s entire population of mutton birds, take flight at the crack of dawn, headed toward Antarctica.

Related terms

• muttonbirding