Hello,
At lunch today a teacher I worked with came in and gave me two mallard wings from a duck her she had taken hunting and brought to dissect with the kids (she gave me a couple breasts the other day which i must admit I overcooked despite her admonishments not too) Anyway my question is what do i need to do with them in terms of preserving the feathers for future use? Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated…thanks
Fingerlaker
There is very little meat on a duck’s wing and I have had no problems with just letting them dry out for about 3-4 weeks in a warm dry place (away from your fly tying supplies). If you want to add a bit of 20 Mule Team Borax to the bit of flesh that you can see where the wing was removed, it will help the drying process. After they have dried, then I would put them in a zip-lock plastic bag with some bug repellant or perhaps a small piece of flea collar to help ensure that there are no “critters” on the wings that could infest your other materials.
Good luck.
Jim Smith
If you still can spread the wing open. It is ezer to get feathers off and just a nice way to have them.
Joe
The easiest proceedure is to merely clip the feathers off with wire cutters so they can be later made up in matched-pairs. This way you have no worry about drying or rotting meat.
Ah Ha, the voice of reason :idea:
Boy, is this ever a timely post. I just got a couple of wings from someone last week and I put them in the freezer in a ziploc bag until I could get some idea of how to keep them better. This keeps me from going through the archives this evening.
Thanks!
While Ray has a good point to do this could cause the waste of other good feathers on the wing. The lesser and middle coverts of the mallard make good wings for a spentwing caddis or as upright wings on dry flies.
Tim Anderson
I have found that if you soak the wings in really hot water for an hour or so, you can pull the primaries section away from the other secondaries and coverts. Then I clip the two sections apart. This lets me salvage most of the feathers on the wings. The primaries are clipped with cutters or heavy duty scissors and the smaller feathers just pulled off in chunks. Just take your time and you get many useable feathers.
I think the hot soak softens the meaty parts enough to make them a bit pliable.
This is just my experience so do not consider it the ‘proper’ way to proceed.