A friend is going on a guided wild turkey trip and has asked if I am interested in any feathers for my fly tying. I have only used some of the Mottled turkey feathers for muddlers and some Atlantic Salmon patterns at $6-8 bucks a matched pair, I use them sparingly
Other than the tail feathers, what else should I ask for? The guys that go on the trip every year just toss them and keep only the meat…
When I get them, is there anything special I should do to them? wash, freeze, etc. I don’t want to comtamintate my current fly tying supplies with bugs.
The feathers right in front of their fan along their back that have the mottling like the tail feathers make some nice wing cases and Pheasant Tail nymph variants.
Also, the secondary wing feathers (not the barred brown and white ones, but the ones closer in to the body) are nice.
Around the legs is some nice deep brown marabou.
The tail feathers obviously. Like QK said, the mottled feathers in front of the fan are excellent as well. 1st and foremost, the mottled secondary wing feathers Also you will usually find flats, in colors ranging from Bronze to emerald green throughout the body…some of all shades make great wing cases for smaller nymphs. And wing feathers…though not as useful, have very tough fibers. They make excellent shellbacks and wingcases, and take to a permanant marker very well also.
Turkeys have very large aftershaft feathers all through the back area. They are great for sparrow nymphs. You would have to get these off of the bird while it is still intact, unless your friend is going to skin the bird. As NJTroutbum points out the primary wing feathers are useful. The biots are strong and large and can be coloured. The fibres from turkey tail feathers can be used in place of pheasant for PTN’s.
whole skin is ideal… But all the flight feathers clipped and matched are very useful a lot of good biots can be had from a single pair of wings… also body feathers from varying spots on the body can also be very useful… as is the maraboo feathers even makes nice dubbing…
My full turkey skin came from a taxidermist. Someone dropped it off to do something with and later changed their mind. I get some great and unusual things at times. Does anyone know what to do with buffalo hair???
Wow, and all this time, I have been relegated to a couple matched tails feathers… take as much as they can bring back…gotcha, hopefully the whole skin apparently…
Ok, so what do i do with the feathers once I get them…wash in something, freeze, boil, steam, microwave? In my 30+ years of tying I have always used processed feathers, nothing from hunting friends.
I am no expert but I would put them in ziplock bags and store them in the freezer for at least a month and then feel pretty good about all bugs being dead on them. Unless you have some kind of snow flea that doesn’t mind zero temps.
Turkey flats are the original parachute post material and still an outstanding choice. They can also be “burned” for use as spey hackle.
Turkey is also the source of marabou. Wild turkeys have just dark gray, but a little bleaching and dying could produce lots of dark colors.
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.
Wash in warm soapy water with a capful of Clorox… Nothing will survive that. Then rinse and dry. It is easiest if they are still on the skin.
art
Hap,
Please excuse my lack of knowledge about weather below about -15F degrees, I am simply unwilling to do onsite research on the matter. I have only lived as far north as Memphis. I do seek enlightment on the topic. I know the mosquito eggs are in water that becomes ice, even at -84F does ice get any colder than 32F?
Yes, ice gets far colder than 32F… The physics of the whole thing are unusal and kind of neat… I do not have time to address the whole issue but a few very interesting facts about water:
Water at 32F has to lose a tremendous amount more energy (heat) to become ice at 32F. It is called the “latent heat of freezing”.
Water at 212F has to have a tremendous amount more heat added to become steam at 212F. “Latent heat of evaporation”. Most materials share these two properties, or rather the fact they have latent heats.
Water gets more dense as it cools, but only to a point, then it starts to expand very rapidly and that is before it reaches 32F by several degrees. That is why streams can freeze from the bottom up.
Ice expands as it gets colder for a little while. This is an unusual set of cold-related actions…
art
Yep. And the reverse happens when ice melts. It absorbs energy (heat) before it melts so it is what we commonly use to cool down our beer!
In regards to killing bugs by freezing, one cycle will not do it. A single freeze cycle will kill the living bugs BUT NOT the eggs that the adult bugs have laid. So freeze for about a week and then take the feathers out of the freezer and let them sit for about 2 weeks. This allows and surviving eggs to hatch. Then freeze again for another week. I even repeat with a third freeze cycle.
Eggs survive freezing, That is why we here in the north woods have insects right after the spring thaw.
I’ve got two bags of emu feathers in the freezer right now going through their first cycle. It is better way of killing bugs than using moth balls or no pest strips. there is no residual chemical on the feathers.
Thanks for the info on repeating cycles of freezing, I had previously not considered the egg side of things.
Hap, you brought back old memories of physic class with latent heats, being involved in fire protection and prevention for much of my professional life, I had always put more thought into the high end of things. And dealing with fire sprinkler systems you know that water expands at approximately 39F, you set your low temp alarms at 41F to give you a little warming when it cools off.
Back in the 90’s I had a client who owned casinos in MN, MS and LA. The broker’s rep and I visited each of them every year for a while. I was very surprised when the guy from the broker told me the ponds in MN had no fish in them because they froze solid in winter. He was equally surprised the farm ponds in MS had fish in them. We got out late one day and he caught a nice bluegill, which he said was the largest he had ever seen. This is a very diverse country we have the privilege of living in.
Silver
I am not convinced the eggs hatch relaibly enough to think frezzer cycling is going to guarantee everything dies. Clorox makes that guarantee and your stuff gets washed to boot…
art
Not into physics or freezing, especially now that the weather has changed here in the sunny south, ( only one frost this week), but I thought I’d share my good luck with ya’ll. My oldest son killed his first turkey saturday. He gave me the wings and the body skin. For some reason he wanted the tail and 9" beard. Don’t know about that boy, only been hunt them about 7-8 years. Here is one wing. Body is too wet after cleaning to show.
Congratulations to your son! Hopefully in the future you will have a constant supplier of wild turkey feathers…and your son will have countless memories of the Spring turkey woods.
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.
