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Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary wrote:

BABE or BABY, n. A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion. There have been famous babes; for example, little Moses, from whose adventure in the bulrushes the Egyptian hierophants of seven centuries before doubtless derived their idle tale of the child Osiris being preserved on a floating lotus leaf.

Ere babes were invented
The girls were contended.
Now man is tormented
Until to buy babes he has squandered His money.
And so I have pondered
This thing, and thought may be
‘T were better that Baby
The First had been eagled or condored.
Ro Amil

I know what it means if someone is spread eagled. I know what it means to go birding.  I I correct in assuming he's talking of providing nourishment for eaters of carrion?