Category Archives: Feather Facts

New Inventory & New Free Shipping for 2018

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NF TFE fthr2 faviconWe’ve got new feathers listed here at www.TheFeatheredEgg.com and www.NaturalFeathers.com – and a new shipping policy of … Free!

We no longer ship internationally for feathers or eggs, and we’re fresh out of eggs, but we’ve got the same high-quality feathers and are adding more kinds all the time.

Shipping is one flat rate of $8 regardless of how many feather bags are in the order and will show up automatically in the shopping cart. Orders will ship using USPS Priority Mail and go out within 3 days of completed payment.

The dark or light fluff items are great for texture and volume in feather projects. Each bag is a variety of short and long fluffy feathers. The Turkey Body feathers are full of personality and vary between pure puffy fluff and some tipped with brown or bronze barring. The cuckoo Maran body feathers are also light and floaty, and delicately barred. Mixed medium or small bags are a sampling of many of our feathers, some no longer available in separate bags.

New inventory, new policies, and a new website for a New YearNF TFE fthr2 favicon

Category: Feather Facts

Happy New Year 2016

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Happy New Year fb

Category: Feather Facts

Review of Social Media Success Summit 2015

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Learn More at: Learn More at:  goo.gl/47Hltw

Learn More at: Learn More at:  goo.gl/47Hltw

The chicken book is still selling!  Still resonating with families all over… Learn More about this education course at:  goo.gl/47Hltw

To successfully self publish a book, an author has to find ways of marketing a self-published book online. Social media marketing seemed like the most accessible and effective book marketing for self-published authors, so social media marketing education came to the top of my To Do list in 2015.

Social media – and much of social media marketing – is free; like a puppy is free. I heard that phrase from someone else and immediately adopted it. It was so cute. But as soon as I got home with my social media, I realized that I was going to need some resources and advice. I needed to join a club or a group who knew what I needed to know.

Category: Feather Facts

A different kind of flying – no feathers required… my new Aviation Biography is now available on Amazon.com

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Now Available on Amazon.com!

Now Available on Amazon.com!

“When No One Else Would Fly” is the aviation history biography of my grandfather, Col. C. J. Tippett and is now available on Amazon.com.

Tip’s passion for flight began the first time he saw a barnstormer in the sky over his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio.

He wrote a memoir of his amazing civil and military aviation life, and I turned it into a book. My first book was about how I came to have so many feathers… and this is my second book!

Check it out on Amazon.com!

“….. Col. C. J. Tippett was an extraordinary aviation pioneer who took himself from working class origins to one of the highest leadership positions in international civil aviation. Between 1929 and 1961, he logged over 10,000 hours of flight time and piloted more than ninety-eight different types of aircraft. In an untiring pursuit for access to aircraft, and in his commitment to civilian flight safety, Tip climbed into the cockpit when no one else would fly. Tip trained some of the earliest Flying Tigers, certified the first class of Alabama students who would become the Tuskegee Airmen, and shared a boarding house with Major Tooey Spaatz and Major Ira Eaker as they made plans for war. He made record-setting solo flights over the Amazon Jungle in 1943 and fished for black marlin with Ernest Hemingway in Cabo Blanco, Peru in 1956. When sixteen-year-old Tip saw his first airplane in an Ohio field in 1929, he knew that he must learn to fly. He didn’t know that he would become the first Director of the South American Office of the International Civil Aviation Organization. Or that he would live in an elite world of political leaders, millionaires, socialites, and celebrities. When Tip finished his memoir, he encouraged his granddaughter, Corinne Tippett, to turn it into a book. Because by the end of his life, he knew that he’d made history…. “

Category: Feather Facts

Blue Feathers Are Not Always Blue

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These blue feathers are the iridescent flash from a Melanistic Mutant Pheasant rooster... but other blue feathers are not just blue.

These blue feathers are the iridescent flash from a Melanistic Mutant Pheasant rooster… but other blue feathers are not just blue.

When we started selling natural feathers for arts and crafts, we started to wonder what made blue feathers blue. Right about the time we realized that black feathers were not always black.

Feather color is not always simply color… it is often far more complicated than just a pigment. The color elements of the feathers are serving a purpose – for the bird, or in a grander plan of world conquest through brilliant feather display.

This makes using feathers for jewelry even more exciting, because they come to our art with a history of their own – from the bird.

Blue was a particular question regarding bird feathers, because it isn’t a color that comes to the feather from the bird’s diet. It can often be a refraction, scything off a feather that looks black, but flashes blue in direction sunlight with a certain graceful turn of wing.

But it can also be molecular. Richard Prum, of Yale University, studied cotinga feathers and discovered that the blue color was a result of red and yellow wavelengths of light canceling each other out as they bounced off the internal cellular structure of the feather.

It still looks blue to us, but I think it’s exceptionally cool that feathers are so cool, inside and out.

Visit our site for a huge selection of cruelty-free feathers from our own birds, and from like-minded small scale backyard farmers. Super cool!

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Reeves Pheasant Feathers – Natural Feathers In A Beautiful Color Palette

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This is a body feather from the Reeves Pheasant rooster. We have them in our Feather Special packs.

This is a body feather from the Reeves Pheasant rooster. We have them in our Feather Special packs.

The Reeves Pheasant feathers on our site are all from our own, and are cruelty-free feathers. Our Reeves Pheasant, Syrmaticus reevesii, were spectacular. We had one rooster and one hen, and while they were not bonded to each other, they fit in well with our mixed flock.

Reeves Pheasant roosters are not particularly suited for a mixed flock. They are aggressive and territorial, and I suspect our bandit-faced aristocrat in the suspicious demise of my single glorious Ringneck Pheasant Rooster… so headsup for anyone raising these birds. They do better in very large aviaries with only females.

and watch your back.
(It’s not that they don’t love you… it’s that they love to attack you.)

The Reeves Pheasant is a long-tailed bird and it is the tail feather that captures most attention. I was amazed by the body feathers. The detail in each feather, different in each place on the body, has the most amazing, crisp, alluring detail.

As is the case with most pheasant, the bird is named for the naturalist who brought it to the west from China, John Reeves – 1831, and I don’t know what the Chinese call it, when they see it in it’s natural habitat.

And the color palette that nature has afforded these birds is perfection. Blacks, tans, creams, browns, auburn, beige, bronze, buff, burnt sienna, burnt umber, chestnut, fawn, fulvous, ochre… and more.

Our Reeves Pheasant feathers are available in the Rare Feather Sampler pack, and in the Mixed Feather Sampler. We sold out of the feathers in a single-pack inventory, but they are throughout the samplers, which are the highest quality feathers of all, from my private inventory and only recently released for sale.

All of these feathers are available at www.TheFeatheredEgg.com!

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Molted Feather Facts… Information About Cruelty-Free Feathers

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Most birds molt once or twice a year. When buying molted feathers, there are some things to watch out for.

Most birds molt once or twice a year. When buying molted feathers, there are some things to watch out for.

Our perspective on cruelty-free feathers is described on this page of our website… and we know that it doesn’t exactly match the PETA definition, but we don’t completely agree with that definition.

We participate in the circle of life, and feel strongly that when all of us, as a society, participate more fully, we will begin to address issues of food justice. We are doing what we can in the meantime, by raising poultry with conscience and integrity.

Feathers that match the PETA definition of cruelty-free would have to be molted feathers. If you are buying molted feathers, there are some things to know so that you don’t get duped by a seller capitalizing on the cruelty-free movement, but selling feathers raised the conventional way.

First of all, molted feathers are molted for a reason. The bird needs new ones, and sheds the old feathers in a grand exuberance. It is generally in the spring or summer, and the feathers are not of the highest quality. The occasional feather from the molt is good-looking, but more often, they are rough.

Secondly, they are not molted in huge quantities. Otherwise, the bird would be naked. If a seller is selling large numbers of “molted” feathers, I would suspect them. Even if the farmer had a huge flock, collecting the molted feathers one by one would be so prohibitive that I can’t imagine how expensive those feathers would have to be.

Thirdly, the feathers could not, and would not, come in matching and complete sets. The birds never molt an entire matching set of perfectly beautiful feathers. That’s the whole point of a molt. You keep some, you lose some.

Our cruelty-free feathers are good karma, clean, and raised with care. We cherished the birds, and we cherish the feathers… and invite you to take a look!

 

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Silver Pheasant Feathers For Arts And Crafts

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silver pheasant wing feathers at www.thefeatheredegg.com

Silver Pheasant feathers are perfect for arts and crafts and ours are cruelty-free feathers, even if the Silver Pheasant themselves were kind of predatory.

The Silver Pheasant is, by far, the most uber-cool bird for feathers for arts and crafts.

We raised our flock of pheasant in a way that means these are cruelty-free feathers. But the Silver Pheasant were not of the same philosophy. They hunted our other birds like a pack of raptors, but they did it with stealth.

We didn’t figure out what had happened to our Ringneck Pheasant until much later. We thought a predator had gotten into the pen, and then escaped after the kill.

The Silver Pheasant were the predators. Once we separated them, as we should have done in the first place, they stopped hunted. They didn’t attack each other. They did stalk us though.

The males are white with black markings, and the females are brown on brown. The males have glorious red face armor, and red legs – crowned with enormous spurs. Their chest and belly are clad in black feathers that are actually so iridescent that they flash teal, purple, green, and cobalt in direct sunlight.

When they are about three years old, their wing and tail feathers defy description. White with penciled black markings, no feather quite the same.

Silver Pheasant feathers are primarily available from overseas, and our stock is limited, but we are very proud to be able to offer them.

 

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Just A Couple Of Chickens Is Now Available as an E-Book!

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Just A Couple Of Chickens is now available on Kindle! (and as ePUB!)

Just A Couple Of Chickens is now available on Kindle! (and as ePUB!)

Available in both Kindle and EPUB formats, Just A Couple Of Chickens is now an ebook!

This is the book that I wrote describing the creation of www.TheFeatheredEgg.com, and the natural feathers featured on this site.

You can find the Kindle version at the Kindle Store on Amazon.com, and the ePUB version is listed at Smashwords – soon available on Barnes and Noble and the Apple iBookstore.

It was my vision to have as a real book… and after I had achived that, I plunged in and swam my way upstream in the tech flood that is e-book.

I’m starting to dig e-books, but last night my battery died and I was dismayed. I love real books. I love the paper and the covers and their presence. I love librarys and bookstores and stacks and stacks of books. I love that they don’t run out of juice. Ever.

I do love the e-reader devices. I am amazed and delighted, as a reader, that I can change the font, size, margins, background color, and screen brightness. As an author and book designer, I am scandalized at that loss of control.

But I need to remember to plug in my darn book. It’s a new world and it doesn’t work well when I misplace my charger.

Kindle!

ePub!

Just A Couple Of Chickens is now available in just a couple of formats!

Category: Feather Facts

Famous Feathers – A Feather In The Hat For Downton Abbey

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downton Abbey at pbs.org has fantastic feathers

Famous Feathers In Art, Literature, and Film. My series begins with, of course, Downton Abbey season 3 at www.pbs.org

For anyone interested in feathers for arts and crafts, being able to recognize the feathers worn by famous people throughout history is a fun skill.

My blog series about Famous Feathers is designed to do just that. Although most of the historical feathers I will spotlight are probably not cruelty-free feathers, we can hope that modern artists are keeping that in mind as they create new ones.

This series had only just begun – (this is the first post) – when Season 3 of Downtown Abbey provided me with enough gorgeous, astounding, amazing, exciting feather headpieces to keep me going for a year!

Feather headgear in the 1920s and earlier was big business in the United Kingdom. It was not only fashion, it was also politics. Status, influence, public relations… it was huge. And the kind of feather, placement in the hat or bad, height, color, reach… conveyed a language all of its own.

The 1920’s, which is the setting for Downton Abbey’s third season, would be known as the Roaring Twenties in America, but for England, it was a time of change for the aristocracy – wearers of the famous feathers.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 had outlawed some of the feathers that used to be used in making the headpieces, so milliners had to be more creative with the legal feathers. They did this by shaping, dyeing, trimming, and using different parts of the same species over and over again.

We kick it off with the Lady Crawley and her elegantly understated wedding rehearsal hat. A dark cloche with a pinned up brim, secured by a floating froth of tan, beige, to dark brown – whatness? I’m guessing Ostrich floss feathers. The floatiest of frothiest plumiest floss that comes from underneath the wing.

I don’t currently sell ostrich feathers, because the cruelty-free feathers for arts and crafts for sale at www.TheFeatheredEgg.com are from our own flock of humanely-raised pheasant, partridge, quail, chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys.

But someday, ostrich, emu, rhea!  I do have emu… which is a foreshadowing of the next Famous Feathers post. Who is wearing emu at Downton Abbey?

 

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