Raising Squab Nowadays Not for Pigeon-Hearted

It's good to be the Squab King, but it isn't easy.

For one thing, hardly anyone knows that the "squab" part refers to delicate young pigeons, plucked and processed before the exertion of flying can toughen their butter-soft breast muscles.

"I'll tell people at parties I'm the Squab King," says Gary Carpenter, who tosses off the title with a grain of salt, "and they'll say, 'The what, the what king?' I've even met some chefs at high-caliber restaurants who don't have a clue."

Sitting in the unheated office of his idyllic little spread near Ojai, Carpenter piles on the kind of laments familiar to growers of everything from cows to cabbage: The market is fickle. Nagging diseases can chew away at your profit. If you're not careful, competition from inferior goods can eventually nudge you off the nation's dinner plate and onto the compost pile of obscurity.

A couple of mousetraps sit on the floor and 11 pairs of knee-high rubber boots--essential garb in the bird business--stand on a rack, awaiting action. Nearby, you can hear the honeyed murmur of some 16,000 pigeons--a vast, otherworldly chorus of coos as sleep-inducing as a New Age meditation tape.

A lanky man with a sardonic wit, Carpenter has been living off the fat of the squab for all of his 58 years. For three generations, his family has bred the avian morsels, selling them to high-toned eateries back when only the most benighted hayseed would wrinkle his brow and ask: "The what? The what king?"

Roasted squab on wilted watercress was the seventh of 11 sumptuous courses the night the Titanic went down. Squab teased the palates of moguls and movie stars; Carpenter's father and grandfather serviced such elegant establishments as Ciro's and Romanoff's, where, Gary Carpenter recalls, "even the garbage cans smelled wonderful."

But times have changed. In 1965, the Cornish game hen--a hybrid chicken introduced by poultry giant Tyson--started replacing the more expensive and difficult-to-prepare squab even at the finer establishments. "A terrible fraud," insists Carpenter, pointing out that Cornish game hen is, after all, only chicken.

Today, the recession is doing no favors for breeders of a delicacy that can hit the $30 range on menus of upscale restaurants. Even worse, cheaper birds raised in Canada are clipping the wings of their American counterparts, said Robert Shipley, president of Squab Producers of California, a cooperative of about 75 members.