Question: I recently purchased a bulk pack of wood duck feathers. Could you tell me the best way to prepare these for use.

Anonymous

Answer: To answer this question, I took a bag of assorted wood duck feathers that had been given to me and recorded the steps that I followed. Here then is one way of preparing these feathers for use.

1) Wash all of the feathers in a warm wash bath using a small amount of Ivory Liquid soap. Rinse well.

2) Wash a second time in a warm wash bath using a small amount of Woolite. Rinse well.

3) Dry the feathers. This can be done in several ways. One way is to lay the feathers out individually on paper towel and let them air dry. If you do this, it is necessary to stroke the feathers so that the barbs are not crossed. Another way is to put all of the feathers in an old pillowcase, tie the pillowcase opening around the outlet of a hair dryer, and then air tumble and dry. Don't use a high heat setting on the hair dryer.

4) Take each individual dried feather, inspect the feathers and keep the best specimens. I discarded all feathers with damage such as broken barbs and kept those without the white and black tip for tying trout flies.

5) Steam each individual feather by holding it in the outlet steam vent of a tea kettle. Be careful to avoid overheating the feather and getting it wet again. The object here is to "fluff' out the feather.

6) Start the process to pair up the feathers by selecting all the lefts. As you steam a left feather, broadly categorize it as you lay it out according to a size and/or shape characteristic. I put the lefts with broad white stripes in one row, medium white stripes in another and the narrow white stripes in a third row. Within each row, I placed the largest overall feathers toward the left side.

7) Now pick out a right feather and match it against the lefts. This process is made much easier by the pre-sorting done in Step 6.

8) For a final match, hold the two feathers up against a light source with the good sides together. The two feathers should have the same width black and white stripe, overall color and shape.

9) When you've matched the feathers, store them flat. I like to use a 3" X 5" card for each pair and staple them to the card at the quill.

At this time I contacted Marvin Nolte for further information on selecting wood duck feathers.

Marvin likes to categorize his wood duck feathers into four (4) categories according to the white bar width:

1) Wide - used for whole feather wings and antique bass flies (a measurement taken on a "Matador" dressed by Marvin shows a white bar width of 4 mm),

2) Medium - used for a bolder look in a cheek,

3) Narrow - used for cheeks, and,

4) Double white bar.

Marvin prefers a narrow or double white bar for his patterns because he feels that they present a more subtle appearance on the finished fly. Marvin also states that pairs with both narrow white and narrow black bars make the prettiest cheeks if you use the whole feather rather than a strip.

Marvin further divides these four groups by size as:

1) Large - indicated by being more or less flat across the tip of the feather,

2) Medium - indicated by rounded tips, and

3) Small - usually these have a very fine uppermost black bar.

Segregating by size prevents using an exceptional pair for sides on smaller flies. The small pairs are used by Marvin for tail veilings.

Marvin also passed on the following. "There is one more categorization I perform but consider optional. For use by only truly compulsive high graders. Some of the pairs will have equal bars. That is, the white bar and the black bar above and below it will be of equal width. I reserve these 'equal bars' pairs for salmon flies. The remaining, perfectly decent, pairs are used on other types of flies."