A small Web accident

[liralen]

I just had a small web accident...

I found the Matoska Trading Company with a search on feathers. It turns out that my quills page is one of my most popular pages. On it I mentioned that I'd never stretched out the wing of a large bird to pick my feathers.

I am about to stretch out the wing of a bird and pick my feathers off it. Admittedly, the turkey probably gave its life for someone's dinner, on the most part, maybe a bit of ground turkey or a frozen breast or even a TV dinner of roast turkey. I bought a bronze turkey wing, because I survived yesterday and the last week of getting things ready for the review, and Jet getting up at all odd times of the night. So I'm getting, of all things, the wing from a turkey to see how the feathers are really placed.

Plus a few grey goose quills, a couple of #2, extra large quills with damaged feathers, and a few 14-16 inch quills just to see how they cut and write.

Yeah. The engineering mentality can be a real sucker for variety.

Comments

[flit.livejournal.com]

Very tangential association, but for reasons which escape me my mom got me a pair of ducks when I was a kid, and I needed to clip their feathers. I had a very kinesthetic memory, reading about stretching out the wing, of holding them, getting them to extend a wing, and carefully cutting enough of their flight feathers off so that they couldn't fly. A very strange activity, really.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Mmm... that is very kinesthetic. That would also be very strange to do, I think.

Sometimes I wonder if that's what Jefferson did for his quills, as he actually raised geese specifically for their quills. Do the flight feather grow back every spring?

[flit.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that they molted their flight feathers every year; we'd find them everywhere. I'd just get the tips, and strip some of the feather off the quill; if I was in a hurry or it was distressing them, one wing was sufficient. It seemed like the ducks were made of air, almost: they're mostly feathers and hollow bones, though their feet were very hot and real. I'd catch them and pin them under one arm, unfolding the other wing; the other one would wander nervously nearby, whacking or squeaking depending on gender. (The female honked when she was distressed, and squeaked in other situations. The male had two tones of "whaaack.")

One year I left clipping their wings too late, and the female flew away. The male got more and more despondant, doing things like wedging himself between planters and the house and sitting there and moping, and finally we took him to the park to let him go, so he'd at least be with other ducks. He immediately got jumped by a gang of duck bullies and I felt so terrible, but I kept following him around and saw him following a line of five other ducks, and the female was right in line in front of him!

Since they were both part mallard, part domestic duck, they were really distinctive, so she was unmistakable. Tres cool, happy duck reunion.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Wow! Quite the rollercoaster of emotion, there. I am glad of the happy ending, and that she was right there! Neat.

Cool to know that they molt their flight feathers every year, so getting molted feathers is a possibility, though I guess they'd be more beat up and possibly damaged and used over the year they'd probably still have solid enough quills for writing. Interesting to know.

[flit.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think they'd actually be pretty okay.

I used to have a collection of peacock feathers that someone had given me from their farm; they'd all naturally molted, and they had pretty decent quills as I recall.