Wild turkey feathers??

[jszymczyk]

Everybody always says freeze them... Tok, Alaska, last winter set the record for cold recorded in AK... It was something like -84F and for a couple weeks it stayed very close to that... Yet you can find ALL of the bad bugs around Tok anytime you look in the summer... If the freezer did anything to eggs it would surely have wiped them out in Tok.

art

I lived in Tok for two years, 2003-2005. The coldest we had was negative 70, thank GOD there was no wind. Spent several weeks when the temp never rose above negative 40. People who say things like "once it's below zero it doesn't really matter" and other such nonsense haven't experienced true COLD. The first time I was outside in negative 60, my vision was blurry, full of wiggly lines- it took a moment and another person to figure out what was causing it- the water vapor and heat coming off my eyeballs.

Anyhow, healthy wild game animals are not usually infested with the kinds of pests which eat hair and feathers. Dermestids, mites, and rarely clothes moths attack fur and feathers once they are in storage (or the critter is dead outside). Package your feathers with some Paradichlorobenzene "moth balls" for a few weeks, and you will be good to go. Para kills invertebrate eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults. I have used a whole bunch of wild game materials over many years and never had a problem introducing any materials-eating pests.