My brother’s wife dropped by yesterday with a bag full of feathers from a wild turkey that was shot on their land by a co-worker of my brother. In addition to two complete wings and some tail feathers I have a lot of the breast feathers. I have saved these feathers from other turkeys too but the only use I have ever found for them was making one of HRH Betty Hiner’s hummingbirds for the fellow who gave me the feathers. Does anyone use them? What do you tie with them?
“Flats” are the standard for wings on thorax patterns.
They are great for nymph bodies like the Teeny, though they tend to be a bit weaker and harder to tie with because of that.
The metalic areas make great beetle backs.
Parachute posts…
Wings on very dark caddis…
The marabou on the long shafts is good stuff and soaking the feathers in warm water and peeling the strips of marabou creates some very neat stuff for soft hackles.
The same marabou makes great leech patterns…
No, nothing you can do with those at all…
Oh, and stacking a graduated series of them creates a salmon fly wing for a couple different standard patterns, but the names escape me…
Thanks hap … I already have about a gallon bag of them but I guess it would be worth saving these to dump on the swap table at the next fish-in. A few freebies always go over well.
Interesting concept, giving stuff away… My tying supplies take up an unreal amount of room… Just turkey feathers would fill a large trash can… But the range of feathers found on the different flavors of birds is huge…
And it is a disease! A few years ago I hunted MT for deer with a friend. I popped over the border to ND and hunted birds and shot my first Merriam’s turkey. Having shot Rios and easterns I expected to find little new in Merriam’s. Nope!
But for the disease: My MT buddy shot an unusual turkey. It was very cinnamon colored with much less spotting and speckling than most birds and the colors were very different from the ordinary bird. Just a gorgeous warm cinnamon color on the tail and wing feathers.
He decided to mount the bird so I kept my lust private.
A few days later I found he had changed his mind and tossed the bird remains after cleaning it for the table. There is no way I am admitting what I went through trying (unsuccessfully) to retrieve those feathers…
And I just keep adding more to the pile. No matter how hard I try to give stuff away I still seem to collect more all the time…
art
Two barbs off the body feather on small hooks make a nice midge.
Rick
And don’t forget the biots. Jim