This Pepin video inspired me to buy whole chicken more often so I could get better at deboning for stuffed galantine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAekQ5fzfGM&list=PLA0E7562A854F9290

Of course he's excellent at it and I kind of suck. I've deboned maybe half a dozen chickens and I got reasonably good at it so I decided to get a duck. Pretty much the same anatomy but everything kind of went to hell. The meat was much more securely attached to bone and the connective tissues were much stronger. I had to use a lot more scraping with my knife and some of the meat got a bit cut up. Fortunately the galantine presentation is fairly forgiving in that you don't get contiguous meat groups. Serving a cross section of bird and stuffing hides all the slash marks and other signs of struggle.

I just made a mess of a pheasant that is in the smoker now. Same problems. Seems that anything that is really meant to fly has more serious muscle and tendon attachments.

Clearly I need more practice, but I'm wondering if I'm missing in my approach to deboning game birds.