<P style="MARGIN: 0px">i should have several hundred grey goose feathers in the coming months. the dnr just raised the limit to 15 a day here in s.c. and i have a bunch of buddies who hunt them. drop an email and maybe we can work out a trade if anyone is interested. i mostly use turkey so don't use many goose feathers.</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">chris</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">ciancade at aol dot com</P>
<P>If you have canadian geese in your area, you can get bags full of feathers even if you don't know anyone who hunts them. Simply find a park or other area with water where the geese like to hang out in the summer. The geese molt in early June, and you can pick up tonns of feathers!</P>
<P>There is a fine supplier of grey goose fletching called Raven Arrows. They also do custom feather grinding - I send them my wild turkey feathers and they do real nice work at fair cost. Good folks too. Phone 208-256-4341</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px">I have purchased a number of feathers from Raven, both Goose and Turkey. They are nice folk - kind of busy, but never more than a month to deliver.</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">Be cautious about those 'molt' feathers. They are weaker that fresh off the bird and prone to mites as well as soon as they hit the ground. Some even have mites on the bird. The mites will chew tiny holes in the feather close to the quill.</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">I have had pretty good luck with 'hard freezing' feathers for a while. I have also tries an alcohol dip to 'kill the bugs'. The feathers dry off fine in a short time.</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">I hand split my feathers and sand them a bit by using a fletching clamp with extra heavy duty paper clips to hold it tight while sanding. The feathers come out great and will fletch near as good as 'Tru-flight'</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">Canada Goose feathers are very durable and almost as popular a seller for me as wild Turkey.</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">Another great fletching feather are primaries from Peacocks. Kind of hard to find very many, but excellent flight feathers.</P>
Mechslasher Wrote:i should have several hundred grey goose feathers in the coming months. the dnr just raised the limit to 15 a day here in s.c. and i have a bunch of buddies who hunt them. drop an email and maybe we can work out a trade if anyone is interested. i mostly use turkey so don't use many goose feathers.<br><br>chris<br>ciancade at aol dot com<br><P>
</P><br>Is that deal an ongoing one?<br>
<P>Good idea about freezing the feathers... hadn't thought of that. Luckily I haven't had any problems with mites so far. When I collect this year's feathers in the next couple weeks here, I'll try the freezing... just to be safe.</P>
<P>I have about 500 goose feathers and about 3 times that in turkey feathers. Let me know, I prefer the turkey feathers. I would be willin to trade the feathers for a couple of nice osage staves. I have not counted the feathers to be exact, and they are all mixed up, primaries and secondaries, but they will all work. I usually send my feathers to Raven. She does excellent work. She did 700 turkey feathers and they turned out as good as anything in the store. </P>
My computer went the way of the blue screen of death. I had it restored but I could not get all my web places to work right. Finally had all my drives cleaned and chucked my cookies and all that nasty virus stuff.<br><br>Tried here for the first time in months and it works again!!!<br><br>Anyway, I went to the Mountain Man Trade show in Monroe WA and sold a bunch of primitive bows and arrows. They really like the wild turkey and Canada goose feathers. They are all had been cut down the quill with a razor knife, trimmed a bit and hand sanded. They work as well as the 'store bought' turkey and only take about a minute apiece to cut to shape.<br><br>The Canada goose definitely hold up better in wet weather. The only down side is that you can only get one good cut per feather. They are not as long as the turkey. I can often get two cuts out of a good turkey primary or secondary.<br><br>Fletch<br>