Chukar Partridge Body Feathers, Medium Bag of Blues@25 Blue-tinged body feathers from our Chukar Partridge. They range from 1 – 3 inches in length. At certain times of the year, and depending on the flock’s organization, these blue-tinged body feathers will appear near the shoulders and back of the top ranked Chukar. This bag does not contain any of the distinctive barred flank feathers that are available in another listing. Scroll down for a picture of the feather.
Pheasant Hen Feathers
Medium Bag or
Small Bag
Each bag is a mix of feathers from all of our pheasant hens. The feathers showcase every shade of brown imaginable. There are so many patterns, we couldnÕt describe them and instead took a random selection of feathers for a detail picture. Your bag may not contain these exact feathers, but they are all close. The pheasant hens were Ringneck, Buff, and Reeves Pheasant. The feathers are from all over the body and back, winter plumage. Beautiful! 25 feathers per bag, ranging from two to four inches in length.
Silver Pheasant Body Feathers
Silver Pheasant Body Feathers
White with Black Lines
Medium Bag
Small Bag
Silver Pheasant have amazing feathers, and exceptionally haughty attitudes. These are white feathers with thin black lines. The black lines can be bold or fine, as illustrated in the images. Some of the bags include a couple of solid black silver pheasant feathers – which is not shown in the images. There are 25 feathers per bag. These feathers are more than an inch, less than three inches long.
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!
Dog the Bounty Hunter wearing guinea fowl and peacock feathers. Dog rocks!
We feel that the Season 3 Finale of Downton Abbey was un-called for, and gratuitous. Matthew had JUST achieved the American (meaning British) dream and – crunch! So no more Downton Abbey for us. We object. We are on strike.
We don’t need no Downton Abbey to celebrate Famous Feathers!
We have Dog the Bounty Hunter!
In our quest for all things related to natural feathers, feathers for arts and crafts, and cruelty-free feathers, we celebrate those who celebrate them.
Dog is fascinating all on his own, but his use of roach-clipped feather cascades in his gloriously grizzled hair is riveting.
Dog did hair feathers before hair feathers were cool, that’s how cool Dog is.
I’ve seen him in Lady Amherst, Golden, and rooster hackle. This picture shows him wearing guinea fowl with peacock body feather accents.
We hope that his hair feathers were made with cruelty-free feathers. We know that Dog is wearing feathers because of his Native American connections – and we are more general feather artists, but nonetheless, Dog rocks. Dog rocks feathers.
Our supply of both guinea fowl and peacock feathers are available in the Feather Jewelry Sampler, which has a collection of feathers idea for making feather jewelry.
Some day, I’m going to make a hair feather extension like Dog’s and that will be a glorious post!
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!
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!
This wonderful feather, from Downton Abbey Season 3 – Martha Levinson arrives, is the tail of the Reeves Pheasant rooster. We raised that kind of pheasant in our flock, as well as others.
The historical fiction of Downton Abbey, Season 3 by pbs.org is not only fantastic, it is full of glorious feathered headpieces that are keeping me busy with my blog series about uses of arts and crafts feathers in history, literature, and film.
I hope that the creators of the pbs special are using cruelty-free feathers, because it matters, and that said… we have to give Shirley MacLaine our full attention.
She is playing Martha Levinson, mother of Lady Grantham, and for her triumphant (for her) and dreaded (for Lady Grantham) arrival, she is wearing a magnificent feathered hat.
The feather is from a Reeves Pheasant rooster. We raised Reeves pheasant, and we were lucky enough to raise a rooster (also known as cock).
The pheasant do shed their tail feathers, or they can come off in natural, non-tragic, accidents, like when our rooster-boy was basking in the sun on a cold winter day and his tail froze into a shaded puddle on the aviary ground.
When he took off, his tail did not, and I was able to scurry out with a blow dryer and extension cord and claim the tail feather. It regrew, but it took time. He was more embarrassed than injured.
Martha Levinson’s hat feather has been curved and trimmed, showing the exotic pattern in a very fine way. You can’t see how long the Reeves pheasant tail feather can get from this hat piece – it can be upwards of two feet long, tapering at the end.
I don’t sell the Reeves pheasant tails, but I do have their body feathers in my specials and samplers, as well other spectacular feathers from the crest and body. And other feathers that appear on the hats of Downton Abbey.
Martha Levinson, the mother of Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern).
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.
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.
ePub!
Just A Couple Of Chickens is now available in just a couple of formats!
