table bird

noun

table bird

noun

1

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

Coordinate term: layer
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:

2 more examples

[…] 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:

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.